Removing a child from a home raises fundamental questions about rights.

In the several months it took me to track down the documents that form the backbone of this week’s cover story, I had more than one person – hell, more than one person at the Weekly alone – ask me some variation of the following: Why are you writing about the rights of those monsters?

It’s an understandable question. The acts allegedly committed by Tami Joy Huntsman and her teenage companion, Gonzalo Curiel, Jr., against three children in Huntsman’s care shook veteran police officers to their core. Huntsman and Curiel have been locked up at Monterey County Jail since their arrests in 2015 on charges that they tortured and abused Shaun Tara, 6, and Delylah Tara, 3, to death, and tortured and abused their half-sibling, a 9-year-old girl who survived. If convicted, Huntsman faces the death penalty.

Huntsman was pregnant with Curiel’s baby when she was arrested, and later gave birth to a girl at Natividad Medical Center. Monterey County Social Services placed the baby into protective custody and then into foster care, with foster parents who now want to adopt her.

So while the monster question is understandable, even as Huntsman and Curiel have yet to be convicted of anything, I maintain the focus of that question is the wrong one.

Instead of focusing on the people, focus on the rights. People are interchangeable, but rights are not. And either everyone has rights or nobody does – and that includes the baby.

There are several goals of the dependency court system, which is where the case involving the Huntsman-Curiel baby began, and led to the decision that rather than trying to place the baby with extended family members, the girl would remain with the foster parents who took her in within days of her birth.

The first goal: protection of children. The second: reunification of the family if it can be done in a way that protects the children. And third: if the child can’t remain in the family home or reunify with family because it’s not safe, to find another permanent home where he or she can live in a safe, stable environment permanently. For social services officials, it can be a no-win situation: If they don’t remove a child and the child is harmed, everyone loses; if they remove a child preemptively, the child’s family can rightly complain the government overstepped.

Clearly, the baby in this case was never going to reunify with her parents, and Huntsman knew it. According to a claim she filed against the county last July, Huntsman requested numerous times to meet with a medical social worker – a right that’s supposed to be afforded to any prisoner who requests it – and tried to arrange for Curiel’s uncle to care for the baby. Curiel’s father also began the process of getting social services’ approval to care for the baby, but never completed it. According to one of the briefs filed in the resulting Sixth District Court of Appeal case, the father claims he was dissuaded from continuing and was told the baby would be better off not knowing anything about her family of origin. A second group of family members – one of Huntsman’s cousins by marriage, who appears to be a solid citizen, employed by the federal government and with a husband employed by the state – came forward last November and expressed interest in adopting the baby, but it was decided she came on the scene too late in the process, and that being a cousin by marriage, she wasn’t enough of a relative to warrant consideration.

The goals of dependency court all come with a caveat: that they be accomplished in a timely fashion. The baby Huntsman gave birth to in custody is now a full-fledged toddler who’s only ever known one home. If the Sixth District finds that Monterey County Superior Court Judge Sam Lavorato erred in not directing the county or Huntsman’s attorney to look harder for relatives, it might still be a, “Yeah, so what?” situation.

Is it reasonable to expect, when a child is 19 months old and has only ever known one home, that the court would order the child to be removed from that home and placed with a relative?

Time moves differently for children than for adults. If you go back to the goals of dependency court, placement with a relative in a stable home may have been the preferred outcome – but a safe and stable home can still be a success story.

MARY DUAN writes the Local Spin for the Weekly. Reach her at maryrduan@gmail.com