Crusader a Savior to Society’s Most Vulnerable : Chicago: Patrick Murphy’s Public Guardian agency serves as advocate for thousands who are neglected or endangered.

CHICAGO —  Patrick Murphy, defender of children and the elderly, fidgets briskly as he scolds a panel of appellate justices.

“The disgrace in this case is we are now six years later and there is still no termination of parental rights,” Murphy says as a red flush of fury washes over his face. “What kind of society are we, that we let this kind of thing go on?”

The case involves a woman who witnessed the murder of one of her children and the sexual assault of two others. At issue is whether the woman should have been allowed unsupervised visits with her children.

For Murphy, it is just one more contemptible example in a mountain of injustices heaped each day upon children and the infirm. Each case--each mistake by a parent, a caseworker, an attorney or lawmaker--serves as fodder for Murphy’s bully pulpit.

That pulpit is Cook County’s Office of Public Guardian, a 250-person agency created by the county court system to serve as advocate for thousands of children and elderly people who are neglected or endangered but have no one else to fight for their rights.

As public guardian, Murphy has gone to court on behalf of an unborn fetus, attempting to force a woman to heed doctors’ advice to deliver immediately or risk damaging the child. He fought for state money for two elderly women who were broke, but preferred their own apartments to a nursing home.

But it is his slashing, often impolitic advocacy for children in the courts and in the news media--and his belief that parents are given too many chances, children too few--that sets Murphy apart from the average balding lawyer with a briefcase.

Consider some of the printable tags Murphy hung on his opponents last fall--mostly child welfare officials--during a legislative battle over funding:

“Vultures feeding on the flesh of dead children.” And “whores.”

Murphy battled for a boy whose adoptive parents gave him up--and wouldn’t allow him to see his biological brother, whom they also had adopted. He won damages for a youth who alleged he had been sexually abused in state foster homes. He currently is waging war on the Illinois Supreme Court, which has ordered a 3-year-old returned from his adoptive parents to the biological father he has never seen.

“He has been a very vocal advocate . . . (for) people who are unable to care for themselves because of their infirmities,” said Robert Gettleman, an attorney who worked with Murphy in developing the state’s mental health code. “I couldn’t think of anybody better to be a public guardian.”

And then there’s this view.

“He spends enormous amounts of energy battling other advocates needlessly,” said Diane Redleaf of the Legal Assistance Foundation, which often represents parents in court cases.

But he has enormous amounts of energy to give.

Murphy arrives at his office before 7 a.m. each weekday, using the early hours to write suspense novels longhand on yellow legal pads. His hard work is augmented with hard play, says friend John Friedman, who recalls a touch football game in which Murphy cracked a rib but insisted on finishing the game.

Murphy is 55, the father of two boys; at his wife’s instigation, they have applied to become foster parents, paperwork he knows will be regarded with great interest by state bureaucrats.

He himself grew up with seven brothers and sisters in a working-class Irish Catholic family on the city’s South Side.

Murphy considered the priesthood but instead chose law school, helping rewrite Illinois’ mental health code before being appointed public guardian in 1978.

His initial mandate was to defend elderly people who become unable to tend their own affairs, but his office began defending abused and neglected children in 1987 after a suit brought by the Legal Assistance Foundation.

What irks Murphy’s critics most is his enthusiasm for airing child welfare’s dirty laundry in the media.

His office “focuses more on public relations than appropriate decisions for children,” said Ben Wolf, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois who works closely with the state’s child welfare agency.

“Even when Patrick’s right about something, he’s sometimes wrong in the manner he raises it,” said Sterling (Mac) Ryder, who recently resigned as director for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.

But Murphy offers no apology for dialing up reporters.

“Their view is that you should not go to the media,” he said. “Confidentiality laws were designed to protect children. They’re now used to prevent anyone from knowing what’s going on within the system.

Murphy has made his mark with a philosophy that makes some people mad: Giving birth to a child doesn’t give a parent endless chances to raise that child correctly. In abuse and neglect cases, parental rights should be terminated quickly, Murphy says, and the child moved to a long-term placement.