You say you demonstrated the errors in the report and Dr. Perlmutter refused to correct it. Was this before it was submitted to the court? I understand there should be some time to review the report by the parties before the court gets it and a party can object to it before it's submitted. Did you do this?Common sense would suggest that I would have an opportunity to correct errors, but it does not work that way.
During the evaluation, I explain the basic facts of the case to Kenneth B. Perlmutter, but I was talking to an idiot. I told him that we had joint legal custody, and here is what he put in his report:
********************No, I was not unsure. Those 2007 papers clearly say that my ex-wife asked for sole legal custody, but the request was denied. We had joint legal custody, and the court papers clearly said so. And yet he claims to have examined the papers himself, and quoted them.
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(Quote redacted by court order.)
No, I did not have a chance to see Perlmutter's report before he sent it to the court. His policy is to keep the parents from ever seeing his report, if he can arrange it, as I noted here.
In deposition, I asked him to show me the document that he quoted from. He produced the application for the order, and the order. He did not seem to understand the difference. He again quoted the application for the order to say that the court had terminated the joint legal custody. I had to point out to him that the application had large block letters across the top saying, "THIS IS NOT AN ORDER".
He eventually admitted that it was insane for the commissioner to take away my joint legal custody based on some idiot shrink's misreading of an order, and to do it without any hearing or due process. Since Perlmutter knew that his error was the basis for the commissioner's faulty actions, I asked Perlmutter to correct his error by notifying the commissioner. Ken Perlmutter refused.
So to answer the reader's question, I had no opportunity to see or correct Perlmutter's errors before they were sent to Commissioner Irwin H. Joseph and issued as a order of the court.
The error about legal custody was not even his biggest error. He got all of the major elements of the case wrong.
2 comments:
Look into rules of the court around evaluations. Before it's submitted to the judge, it must go to the attorneys first (or to you in this case if you're self-represented). That is the final report, but you have 15 days to file objections before it's forwarded to the court. If you object, there is a meet & confer with the parties and the evaluator to discuss the objections and make a good-faith effort to agree before it goes to the court. Disclaimer her is that the evaluator will almost never make changes or re-open the report unless there are new allegations that are extremely compelling, to do so would open up all past and future reports for reinterpretation. So, in your case I don't think it would have changed anything. However, if your case did not follow this mandatory process and you had no chance to object prior to the court seeing the eval, I would assume it's grounds to dismiss the report. This was a standard 730 evaluation, right?
No, none of those rules apply. Perlmutter sent it straight to the court. Even worse, he sent it to a juvenile delinquency court commissioner who issued an order without any opportunity for input from me. Yes it was a 730 report and I tried to dismiss it, but I failed.
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