Back in Cmr. Joseph's court

My ex-wife and I were back in Commissioner Irwin Joseph's court yesterday, just before he moves to juvenile delinquency court. There were several issues pending. For the most part, he rejected the motions and left us in limbo. He refused to address any of the obvious ongoing injustices.

The only motion he granted was to seal the reports from the gay shrink, the inkblot tester, and the AWOL court lawyer. The first one said that I was unorthodox, but recommended 50-50 custody anyway. The second had computer-generated Rorschach inkblot analyses. The third was just a short statement from a court-appointed lawyer endorsing the court doing whatever it was going to do. I don't know what is so secret about any of this stuff, except that it embarrasses the court that it would make decisions based on such superficial, biased, and indefensible opinions.

The oddest part of the hearing was when Cmr. Joseph rejected AngryMom's motion to order certain reports from the next evaluation. She wanted to use the reports favorable to her, and to exclude the reports favorable to me. Cmr. Joseph just couldn't bring himself to issue an order that was so obviously and transparently biased, but he couldn't seem to be able to say that he was rejecting the motion either.

So instead he recited statutes and rules for evaluations, and babbled about how a couple of the reports were evaluations of me only, and therefore would not have met the requirements of a court-ordered evaluation of both of us. He also said that we are to provide only those reports that are requested by the evaluator, and to give copies to the other party. Then he announced that he was finished ruling on the matter.

But he had not ruled on the motion, so I asked, "So if the evaluator asks for the reports on me, am I prohibited from giving them or not?"

Then the Commissioner said, "He won't know about them unless you tell him about them. ... I am sure you are going to find a way to give these reports to the evaluator, if that is what you really want to do. What you should not do is misrepresent those reports as something that they are not."

I don't know why he would say something so silly. It is not a matter of me finding a way to give the reports. The way these evaluations work, the first think the shrink asks for is copies of previous reports. Always. If you do not provide every single previous report, then he gets suspicious and writes you up as uncooperative. The Commissioner was writing the order for how the evaluation is to be done. If he did not want certain reports to be considered, then all he has to do is to put that in the order. He did not. As it is, I will have to disclose the reports whether I like it or not.

I also have no power to misrepresent the reports, even if I wanted to. The reports themselves say who and what was being evaluated, and why. I could not possibly pretend that an evaluation report of just me was really an evaluation of both of us. Each report is completely obvious for what it is. I don't see any reason to explain any of them. They are self-explanatory.

Unfortunately, the psychologist is now unhappy with the wording of the court order for an evaluation. He says that it does not make any sense. But there is not much we can do about it. I have made repeated attempts to get clarifications from the court, without success, and now my ex-wife has also. The Commissioner insists on just using the boilerplate form with a few confusing checkboxes checked. He does not seem to even understand why no one can make sense out of it. The three local psychologists in town are able to do evaluations without even looking at the order, so he doesn't see how the order could be defective.