Kids to be allowed in court

The San Jose newspaper reports:

SACRAMENTO - The state Legislature Monday gave final approval to a proposed law that would increase the chances that children who are suspected victims of abuse or neglect will be present at court hearings to decide their fate.

The legislation, which received unanimous approval by the state Assembly, now will go to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has 12 days to sign the bill once it reaches his desk.

The measure was pushed by Assemblyman Dave Jones, D-Sacramento, after the Mercury News series "Broken Families, Broken Courts" in February identified as one significant problem of dependency courts statewide the fact that children routinely were absent from hearings at which their fate was decided. The problem was later highlighted in a report on dependency court by a blue-ribbon commission appointed by state Chief Justice Ronald George.

The Assembly voted 76-0 for the bill after Jones said in a speech on the floor that the "genesis" for the legislation was the Mercury News series, which focused on cases such as that of Zairon Frazier of Alameda County.

The legislation, AB 3051, would require judges, referees and commissioners to postpone dependency court hearings if a child age 10 and older is not present and has not been properly notified or given an opportunity to attend. At the hearings, judges or their substitutes - referees or commissioners - consider allegations of abuse or neglect by parents, and decide the fates of children temporarily placed in foster care.

Jones cited Frazier's case as he said: "Unfortunately, children over the age of 10 throughout the state of California are deprived of the opportunity to be heard in the courts making decisions about their future." He added, "This bill simply says they should be given a chance to be heard, they should be allowed to testify."

Commissioner Irwin H. Joseph has a policy of never allowing kids in court. My kids were not allowed in court. A unanimous vote of the California legislature says that he is doing the wrong thing.

Rosse letter not in the file

One thing that I did not find in the court file was the letter from Will Rosse. He was the part-time school psychologist who participated in the CPS investigation of my kids. I thought that he was particularly irresponsible and cruel to my kids, and I commented on what he did on this blog.

Rosse took it upon himself to try to intervene in my divorce case, and wrote a secret letter to the judge. I never saw a copy of the letter. Apparently he was annoyed that I described what he did on my blog, and wanted the court to do something about it. Comm. Joseph should have refused to accept the letter, but he read it and said that he was putting it in the file. It is not in the file.

I do think that it is really wrong for the court to work this way. If Rosse had some legitimate concerns about my kids, then he should tell me his concerns. He has not. Instead he secretly tells CPS and the court something -- I don't even know what -- and then he hopes that I will not find out.

The court is a public process. We had a public trial. If Rosse really had something important to say to the court, then he could have testified and answered questions at the trial. Or if he had something to tell me, he could have told me. But there is no way that he should be sending secret letters to the court, and no way Comm. Joseph should be accepting them. The system is too corrupt.

Commissioner Joseph keeps secret files

One of the common complaints about Santa Cruz family court is the way Commissioner Irwin H. Joseph makes decisions based on one-sided evidence. He will often accept a letter from one side of the case, and make a ruling based on it, without the other party even seeing the letter.

He even has the official court files organized to distinguish between the legitimate and illegitimate evidence. Each file has a right-hand-side that has proper filings, and a left-hand-side that has inadmissible junk that that should never have been accepted.

I believe that someone is currently filing a formal complaint against Comm. Joseph for this practice.

I have just learned that Junk Justice Joseph has recently adopted a worse policy. Now the court files often have a manila envelope in them that is marked "confidential". He has instructed the clerks that not even the parties to the case are allowed to look in the secret envelope, or even know what is in it!

This is really wrong. There is no way a court should be keeping files of secret evidence that is not even available to the parties in the case. Only a crooked judge would do something like that. Junk Justice Joseph should be fired immediately for maintaining secret evidence against litigants in his courtroom. The American justice system is based on both sides of a court case having all the evidence.

Junk Justice Joseph on intentional acts

The Sally Mitchell CPS report against me said:

XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX
Text omitted by Oct. 24, 2008 order of Commissioner Irwin H. Joseph, Santa Cruz Family Court.

When she testified on the witness stand, I asked her just what I was intentionally doing. She answered that I was doing things like asking the kids to do their homework, help with the dishes, and wake up in time to goto school.

Afterwards, Commissioner Irwin Joseph gave this speech:

Frequently during this hearing, the word "intentionally" came up. And the interpretation of intentionally to the Court, I suspect, is different than Father's interpretation and maybe Mother's as well. If one intends to do the act, whatever the act is, then usually it's the case that they're responsible for the consequence, even if they didn't intend the consequence. When one intends to strike a match, there is a resulting fire. Obviously, the person didn't intend to set the room on fire, but they did intend to strike the match. So a whole series of questions was -- were posed -- series was posed to Sally Mitchell and Mr. AngryDad about intentional. And they sort of miss the mark in large measure because they focus on the consequence of intend as opposed to did you do this intentionally or negligently or accidentally, which is really the alternative, the poles to be discussed.

So whether he likes to acknowledge it or not, Father did most of what he did intentionally. He intended that these things occur. That is the issue that the Court finds to be truthful and accurate and persuasive.

I readily acknowledged on the witness stand that I asked my kids to help with household chores, and do homework and other such tasks. I absolutely denied that my purpose was to irritate, frustrate, separate, or demean them, or that they ever suffered any adverse consequence from my actions.

Comm. Joseph then tries to address the fact that no one could find any evidence of harm:

If my deputy goes to someone and puts her gun at their temple and just stands there for a moment and then puts the gun back in the holster -- not that she would ever do that. But if she were to do that, one could say no harm occurred. She put the gun back in the holster. But how was the person made to feel? When the alarm clock is set, no harm is done. They're at school on time. But how are the kids made to feel? ... When they want to buy food besides Costco food, but Dad shops at Costco every Monday for the week, how are they made to feel? When they're enrolled in a contest that they know is for people that are older than they even though they might win the contest -- and no one is arguing about the virtue of children being ahead of their grade level in mathematics. But how are they made to feel?

So Comm. Joseph was speculating that the kids might have been irritated by me setting the alarm to wake them up for school, or by buying groceries, and therefore I was intentionally irritating the kids.

For idiotic rants like this, Comm. Joseph is known as Junk Justice Joseph.

CPS filed a secret legal brief

In the court record I found a legal brief in support of confidentiality from a CPS (aka HRA) lawyer. I had never received a copy. It includes goofy requests like this:

If the Court holds an in camera review and determines that all or part of the information should be disclosed to the requesting party, then the Court is requested to order the following: ...

7. That at the conclusion of t his case, all counsel be required to destroy whatever documents were released to them or return their copy to HRA's attorney of record (OFFICE OF SANTA CRUZ COLNTY COLNSEL, Attention: SHANNON M. SULLIVAN, Assistant County Counsel, 701 Ocean Street, Room 505, Santa Cruz,
California 95060).

I guess this is how they try to shelter themselves from criticism. They file secret legal briefs with the court asking for a secret review of the papers and an order to destroy copies!

No, there isn't much chance I will be destroying the documents. The document proves bad conduct on the part of Sally Mitchell and others at CPS. I have posted excerpts on this blog already, and I will be posting more to the extent that the law allows.

Florida allows blogs to criticize judges

A Miami Florida newspaper reports:

The Florida Supreme Court has intervened in a proposed settlement between The Florida Bar and a Fort Lauderdale defense attorney facing discipline for calling a Broward judge an "evil, unfair witch" on a courthouse blog.

Accused of violating Bar rules by impugning the judge's qualifications or integrity, Sean Conway, 37, had agreed to resolve the case by accepting a public reprimand.

The state's high court on Monday ordered the two sides to submit briefs on whether Conway's comments are "protected speech under the First Amendment."

It cited a case that says an attorney's comments "play an important role in exposing valid problems within the judicial system" and gave both sides until July 14 to provide additional information.

"It reassures my faith in the system to know that the Supreme Court would take time out of its busy schedule to protect the First Amendment when The Florida Bar doesn't appear to find it as important," Conway said Tuesday.

It is extremely rare for the court to intervene in a settlement like this. The Florida Supreme Court must have felt very strongly that attorneys have a First Amendment right to criticize judges on their blogs, no matter what Bar Assn rules say.

Received the transcript

I finally got my court transcripts, so the record should be complete for my appeal to a higher court. I am checking it now. So far, I have found some errors and some missing pages. I am not sure what to do about them. If they are not critical, I may just ignore them. I will post more from the papers when I get the chance.

Update: I just confirmed that the appeal court also received the record. The next step is for me to file my opening brief.

Parents rights group meets

The National Coalition for Family Justice West is meeting at 7pm this evening at Pedro's in Los Gatos California. They swap info on dealing with the court system.

Update: I went, and met some nice folks with some good ideas for protesting unfair court actions. Charles H. Wittman, director of Advocates for Children and Families, was there. He is not a lawyer, but he has successful court actions. He has even stopped CPS in federal court.

No free speech in Singapore

Silicon Valley lawyer Gopalan Nair said:

I made it clear on my blog that the judge was biased and had prostituted herself by acting as if she were an employee of Lee. I didn’t mean she was a prostitute, but in her actions she was abusing her authority. That’s the correct use of prostituting oneself, right?

Yeah, that's right, but now Nair is sitting in a Singapore jail for “insulting a public servant in a judicial proceeding.”

Another crooked shrink

I just got a callback from a Monterey psychologist who does custody evaluations. I told her a little about my case. She said that she would not be satisfied with the court testimony. She would require me to sign a waiver so that she could call CPS and secretly get stuff that CPS might not have been willing to say in court. She said that is how she always does evaluations.

This was yet another demonstration of how crooked the system is. There is no legitimate justification for an out-of-court interview of a witness when that witness testified in full under oath. What would the reasoning be? That the out-of-court interview is going to be more truthful than the testimony under oath? That the psychologist's impression of the CPS social worker is somehow more important than the judge's?

The funny thing about these forensic psychologists is that when they say something that is contrary to common sense or legal practice, they often follow it up with a little speech about how professional ethics require it. And then they are dead wrong about their professional ethics. Here is the APA Code of Ethics. It does not require a forensic psychologist to do secret interviews, or anything so foolish.

Court reporter still delinquent

I still don't have all my transcripts, because the court reporter is months overdue and has used up all her extensions. She is now at risk of being found in contempt of court. She does not have very much to do -- I wish that she would just do it so I could get on with my appeal.

Summarizing the appeal process

Since I am working on an appeal, here is a brief outline of what is involved.

The family court is not supposed to be the last word on anything. If you are dissatisfied with an order, you have one appeal as a matter of right.

Figure out if the order is appealable. You want to make sure that it is a final order, and you have all your evidence on the record. If there is any possibility of getting what you want in the court you're in, you should try that first.

If you have a lawyer, ask him to explain the appealability of any order that goes against you. Even if he does not do appeals himself, he should know what is appealable and be able to refer you someone who does the appeal.

Here is some advice for family court lawyers to help make a case ready for appeal. Unfortunately, many family court lawyers don't know these things, and ruin your chances on appeal.

File a notice of appeal, within 60 days of the order. Then you have to designate the record, within 15 days after that. The record consists of two bound volumes. One has court pleadings and orders. The other has transcripts. You have to pay court reporters to produce the transcripts.

Once the court of appeals has the record, you file a 50-page brief. There are some silly rules about format and copies.

Your opponent will file an opposition brief, and you get a chance to file a reply brief.

Once the court gets all the briefs, it schedules oral arguments. The decision comes in the mail about two months later.

Scary doodles send man to prison

I was trying to learn about forensic psychologists when I ran into this story about a man who went to prison for murder largely on the testimony of a prosecution psychologist who did some bizarre theorizing. One of his chief arguments was that the above doodle especially incriminating. The accused, Tim Masters, was eventually cleared and released after serving nine years in prison.

Father doesn't know best, court rules

A Toronto Canada newspaper reports:

First, the father banned his 12-year-old daughter from going online after she posted photos of herself on a dating site. Then she allegedly had a row with her stepmother, so the father said his girl couldn't go on a school trip.

The girl took the matter to the court - and won what lawyers say was an unprecedented judgment.

Madam Justice Suzanne Tessier of the Quebec Superior Court ruled on Friday that the father couldn't discipline his daughter by barring her from the school trip. ...

Even though the school trip is now over, the father is appealing the ruling because his moral authority over his child had been undercut by the court, said his lawyer, Kim Beaudoin. "He is stunned by this situation. He feels like he's lost his daughter," Ms. Beaudoin said in an interview.

"My client wants to appeal so no other parents will live through the same thing."

Lucie Fortin, the lawyer representing the 12-year-old, said the judge found that depriving the girl of the school trip was an excessive punishment. ...

Before Judge Tessier, she cited Sections 159 and 604 of the Quebec Civil Code, which allow minors in some circumstances to initiate court proceedings relating to the exercise of parental authority.

Ms. Beaudoin said Section 159 is normally used in extreme circumstances, for example when a child wants to be removed from negligent parents.

Wow. I thought that there were some limits to judges' willingness to micro-manage parental decisions.

The school trip required parental permission. That means that the parents have the discretion to give permission, or withhold permission. No judge can possibly know whether the father was being reasonable. By undercutting his authority, there is likely to be trouble ahead for that girl.

My transcript is overdue

The deadline is now past for the court reporter (Linda Parks) to turn in her transcript for my case on appeal. She got a couple of extensions already, but they have now expired. If she hasn't done it by now, she is supposed to be held in contempt of court. She has delayed my appeal a couple of months already. I hope she turned in the transcript.

Update: An order went out to show cause as to why she should not be held in contempt of court. The court reporter then promised to do the transcript real soon.

Paranoid psychologists

I called some psychologists this morning. They are a strange group. One thing I learned is that a lot of them are paranoid about their professional licenses. They don't want to be accused of doing anything unethical, because then their license might be challenged and they might never make the big bucks again.

Many psychologists believe that it is unethical to ever make custody recommendations to the court, as is commonly done in custody evaluations. So they refuse to do them. Others will only do them if they are named in a court order, because they believe that the court then shelters them from professional liability.

If a psychologist does an evaluation, he often says that he has an ethical obligation to apply his professional expertise, even if it is irrelevant to the case. Usually, this means giving psychological tests like inkblot tests. Sometimes, he will even say that he has to do the tests himself, and not rely on the results of others. Other psychologists prefer to get the test results of others.

Delivering a report to the court seems to really scare these folks. Even those with a lot of court experience are intimidated by it. They seem to be afraid that the report will be questioned, and they will not be able to defend what they wrote.

I do not know any other professionals that are so afraid to put their opinions in writing. I think that the core of the problem is that know that what they are doing is dishonest and unethical, and they do it anyway. And they make a lot of money doing it, and they could not make it elsewhere.

Obama slams black fathers

Senator Barack Obama gave this father's day speech:

In an address Sunday that was striking for its bluntness and where the candidate chose to give it, Obama directly addressed one of the most delicate topics confronting black leaders: whether absent fathers bore responsibility for some of the intractable problems afflicting black Americans. Obama noted that "more than half of all black children live in single-parent households," a number that he said had doubled since his own childhood.

Too many fathers are "missing from too many lives and too many homes," Obama said to a chorus of approving murmurs from the audience. "They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it."

I think that this speech is offensive. Yes, Obama's African father abandoned him, but Obama had a white mom and a privileged upbringing that has little in common with black Americans.

Obama puts all the blame on the black fathers, but there should be just as much blame on the black mothers who are having illegitimate babies, on the welfare system that encourages illegitimacy, and on the courts for a bunch of anti-father policies.

Obama is a phony who is trying to pander to whites by showing that he is willing to criticize black men. At the same time, he tries to portray himself as a black man who overcame a fatherless family. I don't buy it. If he really wanted to fight fatherlessness, he would propose something constructive.

The Half Sigma blog writes:

The NY Times headline says that Obama is assailing absentee black fathers. Some people will be snookered into thinking that this sounds vaguely conservative because he’s blaming someone besides whitey. But it takes two people to have a baby. Someone needs to blame black women for the problem. Black women are more responsible than the black men. A black woman who wants to get pregnant will be able to find some man to unwittingly help her.

On Friday, Mr. Obama announced that he would be a co-sponsor of a bill with Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, that his campaign said would address the “national epidemic of absentee fathers.” If passed, the legislation would increase the enforcement of child support payments and strengthen domestic violence prevention services.

The message here is that if a black woman has a baby out of wedlock, someone else (either the government or the unfortunate sperm donor) will pay for it. States have already been rigorously going after fathers for child support, and it has been a disaster. The men who impregnate welfare mothers tend to be too poor to pay any child support. And the lives of innocent men have been ruined. Read this excellent Reason Magazine article. And read these real facts about deadbeat dads from a prosecutor who has prosecuted countless cases against them.

Obama’s solution to our nation’s problems is to federalize a really bad state policy.

Glenn Sacks also slams Obama for this speech.

Local group opposes Commissioner Joseph

There is a local group that is collecting info on how the county's only family court judge, Commissioner Irwin H. Joseph, is not doing his job properly. I just attended one of their meetings. They told me some amazing stories of ignorance and incompetence on his part. They are planning a web site, and I will post a link when the site is available.

Their goal is to get someone better in the family court, and to reform some of the particularly harmful court practices.

Shared parenting after divorce

The NY Times Magazine has a father's day article on Equally Shared Divorce.

No free speech in Canada

Here is some news from Canada:

WINNIPEG - A case of two youngsters seized from a couple suspected of being racist has raised the question of how far parents can go in teaching their children what they think is right.

"I think it's really a tough issue," Harvey Frankel, a professor of social work at the University of Manitoba, said Monday.

"I'm not aware of the courts giving a whole lot of guidance here in (this) area of child welfare." ...

Manitoba guidelines allow child welfare workers to investigate any situation where there is concern for the safety or well-being of a child, including cases involving "religious or political practices ... if those practices could be harmful to the child," said Nadine Delisle, communications co-ordinator for Family Services and Housing.

Whether a judge would permanently remove kids from parents with racist beliefs could be a different matter, according to Frankel.

Unfortunately, there is no free speech in Canada. A professor was recently ordered:

That Mr. Boissoin and The Concerned Christian Coalition Inc. shall cease publishing in newspapers, by email, on the radio, in public speeches, or on the internet, in future, disparaging remarks about gays and homosexuals. Further, they shall not and are prohibited from making disparaging remarks in the future about Dr. Lund or Dr. Lund’s witnesses relating to their involvement in this complaint. Further, all disparaging remarks versus homosexuals are directed to be removed from current web sites and publications of Mr. Boissoin and The Concerned Christian Coalition Inc.

The above custody case is not a tough call at all. If you believe in free speech, then no parent should ever lose his kids because of political views. The next time you hear a Canadian support same-sex marriage or something like that, just remember that he might just be saying that because he does not want the government to take his kids away.

An article in tomorrow's NY Times explains:

“In much of the developed world, one uses racial epithets at one’s legal peril, one displays Nazi regalia and the other trappings of ethnic hatred at significant legal risk, and one urges discrimination against religious minorities under threat of fine or imprisonment,” Frederick Schauer, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, wrote in a recent essay called “The Exceptional First Amendment.”

“But in the United States,” Professor Schauer continued, “all such speech remains constitutionally protected.”

This article is supposedly hate speech in Canada. It is actually a quite sensible article about Islam.