Guardian seeks media ban in Wheaton child abandonment case
The guardian for a 2-year-old boy who was abandoned at birth in Wheaton sought to have the news media banned Tuesday from court proceedings that will determine whether the child's natural mother is fit to be a parent.
Aurora attorney Kathleen Anderson, who has been appointed to represent the minor, accused the Daily Herald of violating the child's privacy by publishing a photograph of him as an infant on the front page of Monday's editions.
DuPage County Judge C. Stanley Austin was scheduled to begin hearing testimony in the case Tuesday but postponed the matter for a day for reasons not detailed in court.
Austin told Anderson she would have to file a motion alleging a violation of the Juvenile Court Act before he would consider excluding the media.
Anderson has alleged that the child's mother, 27-year-old Nunu Sung, is not fit to be a parent. She is asking the court to find Sung unfit and to terminate her parental rights.
Sung secretly gave birth in June 2009 and abandoned her son — his umbilical cord still attached — under a bush near her cousin's home in Wheaton. She pleaded guilty last year to obstructing justice and is slated for parole from prison in January.
Sung's attorneys say their client was traumatized by a dramatic escape from Burma, where she lived in fear of a violent regime before coming to the U.S. as a refugee. They say Sung kept her pregnancy secret because unwed mothers were shunned and she faced potential violence in her home country.
Terminating Sung's parental rights, her attorneys have argued, also would violate the terms of a constitutionally protected plea deal in which prosecutors agreed to not stand in the way of her seeking to raise the child upon her release from prison.