Last Dance, Last Chance

few days there. Each time, Debbie thought that Judge Mix would let Ralph and Lauren come home to live with her. She tried to follow every directive Judge Mix gave her and to answer every question. But the children were still living with Carmine and his family.
    It was like a frustration nightmare where one escape door opens on another and another and another. Although Debbie was getting physically and mentally stronger all the time, she didn’t have her children.
    Anthony’s attorney, Joel Daniels, had attempted to use the family court proceedings in Judge Marjorie Mix’s courtroom to find out just what the D.A.’s office had uncovered about Anthony in the poisoning case. This was pushing “discovery” way beyond the point that Frank Sedita felt was either relevant or proper, and Judge Mix seemed to take forever to make a decision whether Anthony and his defense team could see all the files of their investigation.
    Judge Mix’s responsibility was to decide whether Ralph and Lauren Pignataro were neglected children. However, the judge would continually refer to Debbie’s poisoning and say, “I have to get to the bottom of this.” Solving the criminal case should not, Sedita felt, be a part of the matter of child neglect before Judge Mix. In a legal sense, it was apples and oranges.
    The D.A.’s office had been granted intervenor status, and Sedita moved again to quash the subpoena that used the discovery option of the Family Court Act to obtain criminal investigative files from the West Seneca Police Department. If the subpoena wasn’t stopped, Anthony and his attorneys would have access to all the information Sedita and the detectives had obtained in the poisoning investigation. That would grant them an “open sesame” to anything and everything the investigators knew about Pignataro.
     
    Sedita pointed out in an order to show cause on February 4, 2000, that Anthony was currently on probation for a conviction on criminally negligent homicide charges, and that Debbie had almost died of sky-high levels of inorganic arsenic. “She survived the poisoning but has suffered serious and permanent physical injury.”
    Judge Mix seemed unmoved.
    Further, Sedita said that a criminal investigation into that poisoning was being conducted by his office and the West Seneca Police Department. “The target of the investigation is Anthony Pignataro, respondent in the neglect proceeding.”
    Since the Pignataro children had no inorganic arsenic in their bodies, Sedita argued that there was really no need for the family court to continue on a “factually baseless petition’s” information.
    Sedita argued that Debbie should be named the legal guardian of her children and said that even the Department of Social Services agreed with that.
    “Of all persons and bodies interested in the neglect proceedings, the only persons or bodies who object to its discontinuance are Anthony Pignataro and family court,” Sedita argued, with a sense of frustration.
    All through February, Judge Mix delayed ruling on releasing the investigators’ records.
    It should have been over sooner. For six months, beginning while she was still in the hospital, Debbie had felt like a target for the Child Protective Service. On February 23, 2000, even though she couldn’t walk or even hold a little paper cup of water when her throat grew dry with nervousness, she was subjected to intense questioning on the witness stand.
    It was all happening at once. Debbie took the stand in Judge Marjorie Mix’s courtroom for two days of direct examination and cross-examination to explain why she was convinced her husband had poisoned her. She answered the questions put to her by Denis Scinta and then by Joel Daniels as well as she could.
    Judge Mix was a mother and a grandmother, but she was also a jurist given to sudden explosions of temper, and Debbie was afraid of her wrath as she sat in the witness chair. Her cousin Denis tried to tell her during breaks that it would be all right. She sometimes wondered how that could possibly be. She was grateful to have Frank Sedita on her side, and Sharon Simon was always there for her in court.
    Marlene Chemen, a senior child protection social worker who had seen the children in both Debbie’s home and Carmine Rago’s home, testified that she felt the children should be allowed to go home to be cared for by their mother and their maternal grandmother, Caroline. And then Chemen, too, was bombarded with questions by