When a State Expert Gets It Wrong: What the Woods Settlement Means for Washington Parents

On March 30, a federal judge in Western Washington closed the file on a lawsuit most parents will never hear about but every parent should understand. Eleven parents of nine children had sued Dr. Elizabeth Woods, the former director of the Child Abuse Intervention Department at Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital and a longtime state expert in abuse evaluations. The News Tribune reported that the case settled confidentially. The terms will not be made public.

Our firm was part of the legal team that stood with these families. I cannot discuss the specifics of the settlement. But the public record — the complaint, the court filings, and the years of reporting that preceded this litigation — tells a story that every parent in Pierce County should know.

What the Parents Alleged

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for Western Washington in late 2022, alleged that Dr. Woods provided “false, incomplete, and/or unsupportable evidence” regarding whether a child’s injuries were caused by abuse, and that she lacked the expertise required to render those opinions. Woods denied the allegations in her court-filed response.

The underlying stories are the kind most parents read and immediately check their own doorframe for, just to feel something solid.

A Pierce County couple brought their daughter to the hospital after she fell from a bed during a diaper change. The girl had a preexisting condition — confirmed by her primary doctor and two medical experts — that caused fluid to build up in the brain and could explain the test findings. According to the complaint, Woods did not note the condition. She did not cite the medical literature on similar injuries from short falls. She recommended the child be removed.

Another Pierce County couple noticed blood in their newborn’s mouth. Doctors found an abrasion and a torn frenulum. The complaint alleges two police officers disagreed with Woods’s assessment. A caseworker questioned it. The mother’s explanation was set aside. Woods recommended removal.

All of the plaintiff families were eventually reunited with their children. But “eventually” carries a weight in these cases that is difficult to describe to someone who has not lived through it.

The Context That Preceded the Lawsuit

Woods had been the subject of a joint KING 5 and NBC News investigation in 2020. The reporting raised serious questions about her medical training for the expert role she held, her testimony, and the accuracy of her reports in abuse cases. She left her position with the Child Abuse Intervention Department and was removed as a state medical expert in March 2021, according to the news outlets. Her medical license expired on March 17 of this year, state Department of Health records show.

The federal lawsuit picked up what the reporting had already surfaced: that when a single state expert carries disproportionate influence over who loses their children, the downstream consequences of a flawed opinion are catastrophic and, for a time, irreversible.

What This Means for Parents Facing a Dependency Case

The Woods litigation is an outlier in how public it became. It is not an outlier in what it reveals about the pressure points in Washington’s dependency system. A few truths that I think every Pierce County parent should hold close:

A medical opinion is not a verdict. When a hospital-affiliated expert concludes that an injury is consistent with abuse, that opinion enters the dependency process with enormous weight. But it is an opinion. It can be questioned. It can be contradicted by the child’s treating physicians, by peer-reviewed literature, by independent medical review. If the first expert missed a preexisting condition or overlooked a plausible accidental mechanism, that is the kind of gap a defense team is built to find.

The time to push back is early. Dependency proceedings move fast. The shelter care hearing happens within 72 hours of removal in most cases. The parents who regain their footing in these cases are almost always the ones who had experienced counsel in the room at the first hearing, not the third.

Questioning an expert is not attacking your child’s doctor. Two ideas can be true at once: the doctors who treat your child want what is best for them, and the evaluator who produced the abuse opinion may have gotten something wrong. A competent dependency defense holds both ideas without apology.

Civil accountability and dependency defense are different tracks. Some of the Woods plaintiffs pursued civil claims after their families were restored. That is a separate legal path from the dependency case itself. If you are in the middle of an active dependency matter, the priority is reunification. The rest follows.

The Cases You Do Not Read About

The Woods settlement is confidential. Most dependency cases never make a news story at all. Families go through a CPS investigation, a shelter care hearing, a contested fact-finding, and either come out on the other side with their children or they do not. The public record catches almost none of it.

What it catches, occasionally, is a case like this one — where a pattern surfaces, a lawsuit is filed, and the system acknowledges, in whatever form it is willing to acknowledge it, that something went wrong. For the eleven families who brought this case, that acknowledgment is the outcome. Their children are home. The rest is theirs to keep.

Facing a CPS Dependency Case in Pierce County?

If DCYF has opened a dependency investigation, placed your child in out-of-home care, or scheduled a shelter care hearing, the window to respond is measured in hours, not weeks. Our CPS dependency team represents parents across Pierce County and the South Puget Sound, and we move on the same timeline the court does.

Schedule a confidential dependency consultation →

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This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Reading this article does not create an attorney-client relationship with Melvin & Torrone, PLLP. Each case is unique; past results do not guarantee future outcomes. If you are facing a CPS investigation, a dependency proceeding, or have questions about a prior founded finding, contact a qualified Washington attorney about the specifics of your situation.