That is Mark Pinsley, the Lehigh County Controller and Democratic nominee for Pennsylvania Senate District 16. In 2023, he published a report on wrongful child abuse findings after county lawyers warned he could be sued personally for it. Families got their children back.
Pinsley has called helping reunite these families one of the things he is most proud of as Controller. Their story is told in The Preventionist, a podcast from Serial Productions and The New York Times, reported by Dyan Neary. Episode one, “Creative Financing,” tells how it began.
It started in a grocery store line in 2023. Pinsley hates waiting, so he was scrolling TikTok while his wife paid. A woman came on talking about the Lehigh County Office of Children and Youth Services. That was Pinsley’s territory. She was a lawyer, and she had just won a year-long fight for a couple accused of child abuse by Lehigh Valley Health Network, the largest employer in Lehigh County. (Pa. Department of Labor & Industry) The county had dropped its case.
Pinsley’s first thought was a controller’s thought: if Lehigh County was losing fights like this, it was probably wasting money on them. He emailed the couple that day.
That conversation led to another family, and another. More than a dozen told him the same kind of story: a child taken away on one doctor’s word, and months or years to get the child back. They weren’t looking for money. When he started, Pinsley later said, the families “weren’t interested in a lawsuit.” They wanted the doctor gone and an apology from the hospital. (Morning Call, December 2025)
A controller has no power over child welfare, hospitals or custody cases. What he could do was add up what those cases cost the county and put the numbers where everyone could see them. He couldn’t sleep. He wrote from 6 a.m. until midnight. The report ran 99 pages.
Then the county’s lawyers weighed in. Their letter warned that he might be going beyond his authority, that the county could be sued, and that he could be sued personally and would be on his own. Asked by Serial whether he was scared, he answered: “Hell yeah.”
So Pinsley hired his own lawyer, took out the doctor’s and the hospital’s names, and published anyway on August 23, 2023. That night, the line for the commissioners’ meeting ran out the door to the street. About a dozen parents, some of whom hadn’t told their own neighbors, stood up and told the county. The testimony went on for two hours.
The report described a pattern of inaccurate child abuse allegations by one physician at Lehigh Valley Health Network. It warned that because the county’s Children and Youth agency acts on the hospital’s diagnosis when it separates children from their parents, wrong diagnoses could leave taxpayers paying for lawsuits, and that hospitals tend to shift the blame onto the county. Pinsley’s fix protected both families and taxpayers: a second opinion from an independent doctor before a family can lose a child.
Two weeks later, the physician was replaced as medical director of the health network’s child advocacy center. Six months later, she retired. Nearly all of the families have their children back.
Then a father’s family came to him. Their son had been convicted in 2017 in the death of his infant daughter, largely on the same doctor’s testimony, and sentenced to 20 to 40 years. Pinsley read the trial transcript and couldn’t see how a jury had convicted him. He had an independent pathologist review the case. The pathologist concluded the baby had most likely died of a stroke, and rejected the doctor’s findings.
The District Attorney agreed the doctor’s testimony was flawed. On November 9, 2025, after nine years in prison, the father walked out, free, 69 News reported, “in large part because of Pinsley.” Days later, Pinsley knocked on his door and introduced himself. It was the first time they had met in person. (69 News, November 14, 2025)
The deal was a no contest plea, not an exoneration. The father told 69 News that money was a big reason he didn’t seek a new trial: his family had already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on legal bills, and couldn’t afford another. Pinsley has said that isn’t full justice. Real justice, he told the station, would be a new trial that cleared the father’s name. Pinsley is still in touch with dozens of families across the country who say the same doctor wronged them.
As a state senator, Pinsley could propose legislation requiring a second opinion from an independent doctor before a family can lose a child.
He faces Republican incumbent Jarrett Coleman on November 3, 2026, in a district covering parts of Lehigh and Bucks counties.
Sources: Report NAS 23-01, “The Cost of Misdiagnosis” · Pa. Department of Labor & Industry, Top 50 Employers, Lehigh County · The Preventionist, Episode 1, “Creative Financing” · WITF · Philadelphia Inquirer · WFMZ, August 2023 · Morning Call, December 2025 · 69 News, November 2025 · Lehigh Valley Live, September 9, 2025 · Lehigh Public Media, September 8, 2025.
