Institutional Abuse

Wear Trial Law represents people harmed while in the custody or care of an institution — juvenile detention, residential treatment, court-ordered placements, group homes, treatment programs, and state and county facilities. These claims target the organization’s own failures in hiring, staffing, supervision, and reporting. Michael Wear, a former Marin County prosecutor, handles them personally, and consultations are free and confidential.

What makes a case “institutional”

The defining feature is not where the harm happened. It is that someone was placed in the institution’s control and could not leave.

A resident of a locked treatment facility cannot walk out when a staff member becomes threatening. A detained minor cannot decline to be alone with a guard. A person in a court-ordered placement did not choose the facility and cannot change it. That absence of exit is what elevates an institution’s duty — and what makes the failure to meet it actionable.

What these institutions typically did wrong

Across facility types the failures repeat with striking consistency:

• Hiring someone whose prior misconduct was discoverable through a background check that was never run, or was run and ignored
• Staffing below the ratios required by regulation or contract, leaving one employee alone with residents
• Supervision that existed on paper — camera coverage, sight-line rules, two-staff protocols — and was not enforced
• Reporting failures, where mandated reporters did not report, or reported internally and no further
• Retention of an employee after complaints, sometimes with a transfer to another unit or site
• Records that were incomplete, altered, or destroyed

Cases the firm handles

• Institutional Abuse & Neglect — how liability against an organization is established
• Abuse in State and County-Run Facilities — public facilities and the deadlines that apply to them
• Abuse in Juvenile Detention and Residential Treatment Facilities
• Abuse in Court-Ordered Placement Settings — foster placements, group homes, and STRTPs
• Abuse in Drug and Alcohol Treatment Programs
• Neglect and Abuse by Caretakers and Institutions — dependent adults and in-home care

If a public entity is involved, the clock may be very short

Claims against counties, the state, public school districts, and other government entities generally require a formal government claim before a lawsuit can be filed at all — often within six months. Childhood sexual abuse claims are treated differently. Physical abuse and neglect claims are not.

This single procedural rule ends more institutional cases than any defense on the merits. See Suing a Public Entity: The Government Claim Deadline.

Why a former prosecutor approaches these cases differently

Institutional cases are built from records, not recollection. Michael Wear spent fifteen years as a Marin County Deputy District Attorney — including as head of the Consumer Protection Department, where investigating organizational conduct was the work itself — learning which documents an organization is required to generate and where the gaps in a paper trail are meaningful.

Applied to a facility case, that means the investigation starts with incident report logs, staffing schedules, licensing citations, regulatory inspection findings, and personnel files, and it identifies what should exist before the institution has a reason to explain why it does not.

Free and confidential. Call 415-233-9688.