Beaten to death, little Terrell Peterson slipped through all the safety nets created to protect Georgia's children. A bill currently in the state Senate would strengthen those nets by tying in emergency room doctors, giving them the authority to remove a child they suspect is a victim of abuse.

On at least one occasion, Atlanta police were called by Hughes Spalding Children's Hospital, where a badly beaten 4-year-old Terrell was being treated. A physician believed the child was the victim of long-term abuse and contacted authorities. But police sent the child home, anyway. A year later, he was dead, allegedly at the hands of his grandmother, aunt and aunt's boyfriend.

Under current law, doctors are required to call police and social services when abuse is suspected, but they have no authority to hold the child. Only police are allowed to take a child into temporary protective custody without an order from the juvenile court.

Senate Bill 315, called Terrell's Law in memory of the slain 5-year-old, would extend that authority to doctors. Physicians who treat a child in the emergency room could hold the child in the hospital for 24 hours for assessment and treatment. After a day, doctors would have to notify the juvenile court and request a hearing on the placement of the child.

The bill grew out of the concerns of Georgia pediatricians, especially those who specialize in child abuse.

"This focuses another way to protect children and not get us into a position where a physician has to watch a child go out the door of a hospital, knowing that the child could be seriously hurt or killed," says Dr. Randell Alexander, director of the Center for Child Abuse at Morehouse School of Medicine.

Based on the experiences of other states, physicians would exercise this legal option only in extreme cases. For example, of the 6,462 children taken into protective custody in Illinois in 1999, only 129 were removed from caregivers by doctors. The advantage of Terrell's law is that it empowers doctors to act quickly, which is essential when a potential abuser intends to whisk an injured child out of the emergency room before police can arrive or a judge can be roused.

In rare cases where police are called but fail to recognize that the injuries are serious and possibly abuse-related, a doctor could counter a decision to send the child home and force a juvenile court hearing. In most instances, physicians foresee police endorsing their medical decision that the child warrants protective custody until a juvenile judge can examine the facts.