PORTLAND – The state can use extreme neglect as it does incest and abuse to justify the permanent removal of a child from a parent’s home, the state supreme court ruled Thursday.

The court ruled against the father of a Lewiston girl who was found to be severely neglected, although not physically abused, when police officers arrived to investigate the death of the girl’s brother last year.

According to court documents, police were called in December 1999 because the girl’s 2-month-old brother had been found dead in his bassinet. When police arrived, the boy’s father told them that nobody had fed, changed or cared for the infant for about 12 hours.

Police also found 2-year-old Ashley, covered in her own feces, unattended, and penned in a small room. They described the apartment as “filthy and dangerous” – dog excrement on the floors, garbage piled everywhere, including in the bathtub, insects crawling on the floor and walls, food rotting in the kitchen.

An evaluation of the father completed after the baby’s death found that he “seems to feel no responsibility for his son’s death, and did not seem to think it out-of-line to allow a small child like his youngest daughter to languish for hours behind a locked gate,” according to court documents.

With the court’s permission, Ashley was taken into state custody.

Under Maine law, the state is obligated to take every possible measure to reunite a child with his parents when the child is removed from their care, unless there are “aggravated circumstances,” such as rape, incest or abuse.

Because Ashley was not physically abused, her father argued the state had to give him custody. Lewiston District Court ruled against him, and the state upheld that ruling Wednesday.

“When a parent’s treatment of a child exposes that child to heinous or abhorrent circumstances, the court may consider those circumstances, regardless of whether the parent placed the child in harm’s way through action or inaction,” wrote Justice Leigh Safely. “It is not necessary that the parent be found to have somehow assaulted or otherwise affirmatively abused the child.”

The court also noted that Ashley’s parents had been cited for abuse in 1998. But when social workers stopped monitoring the children’s care, the parents stopped caring for their children.

“If these were first-time parents with no resources, and no training, the apartment would have been no less appalling but, perhaps, not the basis for a cease reunification order,” the court wrote.

“However, these parties had a full range of opportunities offered to them during their previous involvement with [state authorities].”