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129 Pa. Commw. 382

J.S. v. Commonwealth

Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania

Decided November 6, 1989

Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania · decided 1989-11-06

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1989-11-06

How this case has been cited

Cited by 4 later decisions — most recently May 2018

4 state decisions

201989199020002010decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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CRUMLISH, Jr., President Judge,

¶1dissenting.

¶2I respectfully dissent.

¶3Without intending to diminish the serious nature of child abuse, I do not find sufficient evidence in this record to substantiate the filing of an indicated report. It may well be that this fair-skinned child sustained bruises from a single incident of spanking and, of course, experienced some measure of pain. However, this incident alone does not justify the stigma attached to the label of suspected child abuser. I believe the child protective services agency, in its zeal to perform its remedial function, has gone too far by designating this volitional exercise of common parental discipline as child abuse.

¶4Accordingly, I would reverse the Department order and grant J.S.’s expungement request.

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