Forgotten Victims: Exploring the Right to Family Integrity as a Form of Redress for Children of Wrongfully Convicted Parents

Almost five million children in the United States have had a parent incarcerated at some point in their lives. Children who grow up with an incarcerated parent face immense challenges, including mental health issues, problems at school, economic hardship, and the propensity to participate in criminal activity themselves. When it turns out that the child’s parent was wrongfully convicted and incarcerated for a crime they did not commit, the challenges faced by the child are even more devastating. One way that a child may be able to obtain a remedy in these instances is through their due process right to family integrity. The Supreme Court has extended the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause to protect parents and children from state interference with their familial relationships. However, circuit courts are split on whether unintentional state interferences with the family relationship violate the right to family integrity, or if this right is only violated by intentional interferences. This specific-intent element, required by a vast majority of circuit courts, unfortunately makes it difficult for a child who is deprived of a relationship with their parent due to wrongful conviction to state a successful claim, because it is unlikely they will be able to prove that the state actor who wrongfully convicted their parent did so with the intentional aim of violating their relationship with their parent. This Note begins by exploring the prevalence of wrongful convictions, the impacts of parental incarceration on children, and the constitutional right to family integrity. It then analyzes the circuit split and proposes that, because both the minority and majority circuit reasonings fall short, the shocks-the-conscience test should instead be used by courts to determine whether a child has stated a claim of interference with their right to family integrity. This proposed test would allow courts to take into consideration the specific circumstances of a wrongful conviction to determine whether the child’s rights have been violated, instead of relying on a rigid rule that is nearly impossible to satisfy in the wrongful incarceration context. Although the minority view does come to the correct conclusion, this Note argues that the shocks the-conscience test is a better and clearer way for courts to assess this issue going forward.