'47-year-old archaeology professor Chris Ratte is perhaps not the most careful of parents; he says he didn't realize when he bought a $7 "Mike's Hard Lemonade" at a Tigers game, it was an alcoholic beverage (all of 10 proof), and let his 7-year-old son Leo drink the 12-ounce bottle. A vendor noticed the boy with the drink; the boy had no symptoms of inebriation but said he was nauseated; and stadium officials, in a prime example of defensive overreaction, summoned an ambulance, which found Leo fine with no trace of alcohol in his system.'

Although the police reportedly believed Ratte's story that it was all a big mistake, supervisors said that protocol MANDATED that the state department of Children's Protective Services be called. CPS agents then told Ratte that the whole thing was "unnecessary," while regretfully insisting that they too had to follow the rules and take Leo into custody.

'Mike Patterson, Child and Family Services director for the Wayne County district that includes Comerica Park, said that in general his agency's discretion is limited once police obtain a court order to remove a child from the parental home -- usually authorized, as in Leo's case, by a juvenile court referee responding to a police officer's recommendation.

"Once the court has authorized a child's removal," Patterson told me, "we cannot return the child to the parental custody" until the court has OK'd it.

Sounds like an over reaction by everyone involved and an inflexible system.

Fortunately Leo was reunited with his family in a couple of days maybe if Ratte and his wife weren't upper-middle-class academics with access to the University of Michigan Law School clinic professors, it could have been much worse?