In re J.T: Court Reports Alone Are Not Substantive Evidence

If it has been said before, it has been said over a two or more times by the North Carolina Court of Appeals: DSS and GAL court reports can do a lot of things but without more, they cannot be the principle basis by which a court acts, whether it is conducting an adjudication, a disposition, a review or permanency planning hearing. Back in 2004, the Court of Appeals reviewed a disastrous case, In re D.L., which in principal consisted of a district court judge engaging in a protracted argument with a Respondent Mother In re D.L., 166 N.C. App. 574, 603 S.E.2d 376 (2004).


As arguments with judges typically do, this one ended badly for the respondent: the judge ended the hearing by receiving the DSS report into evidence and then proceeded to enter an order, without affording the DSS to supplement the report with additional testimony. The Court of Appeals reversed, noting that the trial court's findings of fact were based only on court reports, prior orders and the argument of counsel, none of which qualified standing alone as competent substantive evidence. A largely indistinguishable situation again resulted in the reversal in 2010 with the case of  In re D.Y., 202 N.C. App. 140, 688 S.E.2d 91 (2010).


The most recent incarnation of these facts has arisen out of Orange County (In re. J.T. COA 16-774) (February 21, 2017) where, as before, no oral testimony was received, not even a social worker to take the stand and adopt the DSS report into testimony, nor stipulations of all the parties that might have provided a basis for the court to receive the report as substantive evidence. In addition, the district court, which sought to terminate reunification efforts, failed to follow the statutory requirements found at N.C. Gen. Stat. §§ 7B-906.1 and 906.2 (2015) cease such reunification efforts. As a result, the district court's order was vacated and remanded.


The moral of the story remains the same: in every hearing where all parties do not stipulate to set and necessary facts, there must be oral testimony to support the court's adoption of particular facts (which coincidentally happen to appear in a DSS and/or GAL court report). This standard is satisfied even when a competent witness (i.e. social worker or GAL volunteer) takes the stand, and merely adopts the contents of their court report in full into their testimony. To do otherwise is to court reversal or in the alternative, the Court of Appeals vacating the order of the district court and remanding the same.