Appeals court does not dismiss

My ex-wife's motion to dismiss my appeal (over money matters) was denied without comment. She had claimed that a written statement of decision from Feb. 2009 was not really final because the Commissioner might change his mind. My response was here. I guess I had a valid argument, and it was only one page! I guess this proves that a court brief does not need to be longer than a page.

District 9

I just watched District 9, a silly new sci-fi movie about invading space aliens who get treated as refugees when they lose their secret power source.

At one point, the human authorities are trying to put the squeeze on a space alien family. The alien has the nerve to read his eviction papers, and demand the promised 24-hour notice. Usually the space aliens are intimidated by the human trigger-happy soldiers who accompany the human boss. But when that doesn't work, the human resorts to something scarier -- he threatens to report the space aliens to Child Protective Services! Then they comply.

Local courthouse cannot handle appeals

I have an appeal pending, but it is constantly getting screwed up. The county used to be entirely in Santa Cruz. About a year ago, the family court moved to Watsonville. Most of the other court functions are still in Santa Cruz, including the appeals clerk.

This seems to be hopelessly confusing to the staff. No matter how I address the envelope, any paperwork I send ends up in the wrong place. Sometimes the paperwork bounces back and forth between the two offices for as much as three weeks. Sometimes a clerk calls up and asks me what to do with the paperwork. I've had to send replacement checks because checks were lost.

I am at a loss to understand how their system could be so messed up. Am I the only one who ever appeals anything? Are all appeals this confused?

Angry dad from another state

I ran into an angry dad from another state with stories to rival mine. He said that his wife managed to get him temporarily committed to a mental hospital at the same time that she got a restraining order against him. It turned out that these actions were in conflict! How could he be a threat to her if he was in a mental hospital? The mental hospital had to release him so that he could appear in court to contest the restraining order.

He also said that the lawyers insulate the spouses from the actual action before the judge. Some lawyers here do that figuratively, but he said that the court had actually built a wall in the courtroom so that the spouses do not see the judge and the judge does not see the spouses. The lawyers try their case before the judge, with the clients behind the wall. After the hearing, the lawyers present their deal to the clients. The lawyers explain that the clients have a right to challenge the outcome, but the judge hates it when anyone does that, and will retaliate against anyone who tries.

This isn't justice. Being able to observe your own trial is a basic human right. If a Third World country did this, I would suggest notifying Amnesty International in order to pressure them into acting in a more civilized manner. No lawyer with any integrity would even go along with such a scheme. Lawyers are supposed to advocate for their client's interest, not to make decisions for the client against his will.

Exposing child support

This is Child Support Awareness Month in California. The announcement says:

Children have the right to be supported by both parents – financially, medically and emotionally. State and local child support program staff are committed to ensuring that California's children are given every opportunity to obtain these rights uniformly throughout the state. In 2008, the program collected $2.3 billion and served more than 1.8 million children.

I say that children have a right to live with both parents, and to be under the parental authority of both parents. Instead, the state welfare agencies provide financial incentives for the moms to divorce their husbands, collect welfare, and let the state fund its bureaucrats under the guise of child support reimbursement.

I don't where those figures come from, or what they mean. This 2004 page says we have 1.8 million California families collecting food stamps.

I do think that we need more child support awareness. If more people understood how the system worked, maybe it would get abolished. In particular, more people need to know that no child support money is ever required to be spent on the kids.

Cruelty to a 4-year-old child

The San Jose paper reports:

Advocates of international adoption are furious over a new federal policy related to tuberculosis testing that could disrupt plans for families adopting children from China and Ethiopia.

The policy already has forced one distraught couple from Virginia, Jay Scruggs and Candace Litchford, to leave China without the daughter they had spent two weeks bonding with.

"That was a cruel thing to put a 4-year-old child through," Litchford said in a telephone interview Monday. "How is she supposed to trust us now?"

The newspaper followed this up with an editorial in favor of abolishing TB tests for such kids, even tho immigrants have caused the county to have the worst TB rate that it has ever had.

It may be sad that some couple had to postpone seeing some kid that they spent two weeks bonding with, but the kid was not a daughter. The kid was just a proposed adoptive daughter who had not been tested for TB yet.

Meanwhile, I spent ten years bonding with my two daughters. They are my real two daughters. They are US citizens, and they do not have TB. And yet they have been taken away from me. The authorities have been 1000x more cruel to my kids than to the Chinese girl. Where are the editorials about American girls losing their real dads?

Protesting dad is arrested

Examiner.com reports:

Donald Tenn, the Sacramento father who traveled to Washington DC recently for a rally to confront President Obama on his "fathers need to step up" comments, will be in a Columbus, Ohio courtroom Monday morning on charges related to his 4 day protest on a 175' construction crane last year.

Here is what the man says:

I hear the same story from fathers in every state. I've traveled the country and have seen it myself. I challenge anyone to sit in any family courtroom, in any city, in any state, for one hour on any day of the week. They will see that the war on fathers is real.

He is right.

Obama healthcare usurps parental rights

Martial arts movie star Chuck Norris writes:

Dirty secret No. 1 in Obamacare is about the government's coming into homes and usurping parental rights over child care and development.

It's outlined in sections 440 and 1904 of the House bill (Page 838), under the heading "home visitation programs for families with young children and families expecting children." The programs (provided via grants to states) would educate parents on child behavior and parenting skills.

The bill says that the government agents, "well-trained and competent staff," would "provide parents with knowledge of age-appropriate child development in cognitive, language, social, emotional, and motor domains ... modeling, consulting, and coaching on parenting practices," and "skills to interact with their child to enhance age-appropriate development."

Are you kidding me?! With whose parental principles and values? Their own? Certain experts'? From what field and theory of childhood development? As if there are one-size-fits-all parenting techniques! Do we really believe they would contextualize and personalize every form of parenting in their education, or would they merely universally indoctrinate with their own?

These govt agents will not be "well-trained and competent", and they will not be just providing knowledge. They will have their own personal biases, and they will have ideology-based instructions to change peoples' behavior. And they will be threatening to take your kids away from parents who do not comply.

Blackballing a visitation supervisor

One of the oddities about my hearing last week is that the Commissioner (Irwin Joseph) seems to be carrying out a grudge against a local Santa Cruz group called SCORE. He handed out a list of the court-approved child visitation supervisors, and implied that one of them had been dropped from the list because she once attended a SCORE meeting.

SCORE is a pretty innocuous group. As you can see from its web site, it only exists to help people deal with the family court. It is not a Men's Rights group, as it has more women than men.

There was a visitation supervisor who showed up to a meeting once. She had taken a course and been certified for the purpose, and I think that she was just advertizing her services. She wasn't getting referrals from the family court, and had to get clients somehow. The other visitation supervisors had full schedules, so it seemed to me that she was providing a reasonable and useful service by telling people that she could also do supervised visitation.

I really cannot see why anyone would see anything wrong with a visitation supervisor going to a SCORE meeting and announcing her services. And yet Cmr. Joseph appears to have blackballed her for that reason. He said that she had attended a SCORE meeting, and so I had to use one of the others.

I suppose I could call that visitation supervisor, and ask her the story. She may not even know why she has been blackballed. But I might get her into more trouble if the court finds out that she talked to the Angry Dad blogger! Yes, that would be ridiculous, but no more ridiculous than being blackballed for making an appearance at a SCORE meeting.

My guess here is that the court likes to keep a very tight level of control over psychologists and visitation supervisors, and it is very paranoid that one of them might learn something that she is not supposed to learn. I know that sounds weird, but I just cannot see an innocent explanation for Cmr. Joseph saying that a visitation supervisor is not on the approved list because she attended a SCORE meeting. What could he possibly be concerned about? Does anyone else have any info or ideas on this?

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.

I can appeal while reconsideration is pending

I filed this with the appeal court:

Opposition to AngryMom’s Motion to dismiss

AngryMom argues that the Feb. 2009 “statement of decision” was just a tentative decision. The court did not say that it was a tentative decision.

I was just trying to follow Rule 8.104 and Rule 8.108. Those rules say that a motion to reconsider extends the filing deadline for a notice of appeal, but delays can still cause the motion to be heard after the deadline.

Neff v Ernst (1957) 48 C.2d 628 said that it is not inconsistent or improper to simultaneously file a notice of appeal and a motion for a new trial.

AngryMom also argues that she is disadvantaged because the record is not complete. The motion for reconsideration was delayed for reasons outside my control, but that motion is scheduled to be heard on July 30th. Even under AngryMom’s reasoning, the case is likely to be final by the time you process this motion.

Unfortunately I only mailed one copy to the court, and the rules require four copies. I am mailing three more copies today.

One problem here is that only final decisions are appealable, and the family court never says whether or not a decision is final. Another problem is that my appeal rights can expire while the lower court is sitting on the case.

Local court loses my check

I got a notice from the local court clerk that my appeal was in default because I never filed a designation of the record with the required payment. I mailed it in three weeks ago, and could not understand it. So I sent the paperwork in again with another check.

Today the clerk tells me that she just got my orginal paperwork and check! She said that it was inexplicably bounced around different court offices for three weeks. Apparently they don't have good procedures for handling appeal paperwork.

Judge says biological dad has no rights

I expect to see a lot more homosexual custody battles.The latest is from Florida:

Two dads face off against two moms. It's perhaps the most unique custody battle in recent Florida history and maybe the most radical verdict. Katherine Alicea and her eight-year partner, Ana Sobrino, decided to have a baby about a half-decade ago. Again and again, they tried using sperm from anonymous donors. But Katherine — a driven real estate agent then in her late 30s — couldn't get pregnant.

Enter their close friend, Ray Janssen, a handsome, gay Air Force veteran.

After some casual negotiation, he donated and Katherine conceived. In August 2006, a sweet and burbling baby whom we'll call Austin was born. Katherine put Ray's name on the birth certificate because she wanted the child to know his dad's identity. ...

After considering arguments from both sides, Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Leon Firtel on June 3 found Ray was nothing more than a sperm donor. Because there was no contract before birth, he had "no rights."

What gets me about this is that the family court is always saying that it is acting in the Best Interests Of The Child (BIOTCH), and yet the judge gives no consideration whatsoever to the right of the boy to have his own father in his life. And no, I don't count some lesbian man wannabe who is going to teach the boy to urinate sitting down.

When the dad is absent in a boy's life

A Florida appeal court ruled:

The father [petitioned] for modification of the final [custody] judgment, requesting primary residential custody of their [15-year-old] son.... the trial court based its ruling on evidence that the father was more likely to ensure the child was engaged in productive, normal, and healthy extracurricular activities, and the child would benefit from a greater male influence in his life. The trial court concluded that the child's development was "disturbingly retarded." It went on to find that the child possessed unreasonable fears for his age, and had "unmanlike" toilet behavior.

Footnote: The child would sit to urinate and was self-conscious about urinating in the woods during excursions with the father.

So the trial court favored letting the dad teach the boy to urinate like a man, but the appeal court did not agree with "the father's or trial court's perception of manliness." It ruled against the dad.

Sometimes I think that these courts have no common sense. What should the dad have done, introduce evidence to the court that men normally urinate standing up? That a boy has had a severely skewed upbringing if he never learned to urinate standing up?

A dad is important in a child's life. That should be obvious, without descending into a discussion of toilet functions.

Federal incentives destroy families

The NY Times reports:

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — After her daughter and a daughter-in-law were each jailed on drug charges last fall, Sylvia Kimble, 46, poor and with a deeply troubled history of her own, struggled to care for six grandchildren.

Only a few years ago, officials here say, the safest path would have been to split up the children in foster care. Yet here they are, rambunctious children wrestling in her living room, Ms. Kimble encouraging her daughter’s out-patient drug rehabilitation while also arranging for summer camp and a family trip to a water park.

Ms. Kimble hardly seemed like an ideal anchor for the children, three of whom have psychological problems. She had spent 20 years on the streets herself, using drugs and without receiving treatment for bipolar disorder. Clean for 11 years now, she nonetheless admitted she had little experience with parenting, having left her own children in her mother’s care.

But Florida’s radical transformation of its child-welfare system, marked by a wholesale shift in spending, allowed officials to take a chance on Ms. Kimble. Instead of spending large sums for foster care, it provided in-home counseling, therapy for the children and cash aid to help the makeshift family stay intact and even thrive.

While the focus on preserving families has taken hold in several states, here it has been backed by a federal waiver that allows the state to use foster care financing for prevention and mental health, an approach that advocates of the program hope will become standard nationwide.

So the authorities had every reason to take her kids away, but they did not.

Meanwhile, no one has been able to find anything that I have done wrong, or detected any harm or threat of harm to my kids, and yet I cannot even see my kids.

Eight evaluations said that I don't have any psychological problems, drug problems, or anything like that. My kids are straight-A students, and everyone says that they were doing fine with me.

Apparently, part of the problem is that the feds pay money to bust up families:

In addition, Florida in 2006 was the only state to take full advantage of an experimental waiver offered by the Bush administration. Ordinarily, federal aid is determined by how many children are in custody. Florida asked to receive a flat fee that it could spend on counseling and other aid instead of foster care when it wished. The shift was seen as fiscally risky — an increase in foster children would not bring more money — but it has paid off.

Let's hope that other states learn from this. There should be no federal financial incentives to destroy families.

Court tries censor complaints about family court

Rhode Island news:

WARWICK -- A child custody case has spawned a case about free speech and just who is allowed to talk about the intricate details of court proceedings and where.

Michelle Bouthillier Langlois, 41, has opinions about her brother Michael Bouthillier's child custody case with his ex-wife. And lately, she'd taken to sharing her thoughts via status updates on Facebook. Like this one:

"Court postponed to May 27. Another month Michael not allowed to see nor speak with his children. More time for children to forget their biological dad and bond with step-father. So much for the Judicial System! Michael has seen his children about five times and spoke to them maybe 10 since November 25th!!!!!!" ...

In June, Judge Michael Forte agreed with Martin, issuing a court order restraining Langlois from posting details about Martin’s children, and the pending Family Court case, on the Internet. ...

That’s a clear violation of Langlois’ First Amendment rights, said Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union.

“Every person has the right to comment on public court proceedings, and the court order that prevents Ms. Langlois from doing so on the Internet is precisely the sort of prior restraining on speech that the First Amendment was designed to protect against,” Brown said in the statement. “Ms. Langlois should no more be barred from speaking out about this case than should a reporter seeking to post information about it on a newspaper Web site.”

It appears that some family courts really hate to have public scrutiny of their evil actions.

Why it matters that the reports were court-ordered

A reader wrote to explain to me why my ex-wife is so eager to claim that certain previous reports were not court-ordered.

He has his own story, which I hope he will post someday. He says that he got sent to a court-ordered evaluator, and discovered that the evaluator had phony credentials and a fake web page. He is another angry dad.

He points out that if the evaluations were really scientific, then there were be some set of standards that the evaluators would have to follow. But there aren't. It is completely subjective. The evaluators are crooks, and they give whatever conclusions they are supposed to give, regardless of the facts.

He says that the evaluators always real all the previous reports. That is how they know what to say. They just regurgitate what has been said before. If the court wanted a more objective result, it could have separate evaluations done independently, and then compare the results. If the evaluations really had some evidenciary validity, then different evaluations should be likely to agree. But they don't, unless the outcome has been prearranged.

I have had eight evaluations done on me. They did not all say the same thing. My reader says that this is a problem for the next evaluator, because he won't know which of the eight to plagiarize.

That is why my ex-wife is so desperate to label the reports that she likes as "court-ordered", and to denigrate the other reports as not court-ordered. He says that the crooked evaluators will know that they are expected to back up the court-ordered reports, and ignore the others. That is what is going to keep them on the court gravy train, he says.

I am not sure if he is right or not, but I do know that I have called dozens of court evaluators, and they nearly always ask who did the previous evaluations. Apparently they want to know whose crooked evaluation will be expected to be upheld. I cannot think of any other explanation. If I sent a blood test to a lab, the lab does not ask if a previous lab has done the blood test.

Sent to anger management class

Here is today's Dilbert.

Evaluator did what ex-wife requested

The really odd part of my ex-wife's motion (see below) is that she keeps complaining that the 2005 report was not court-ordered. Judge Kelly did indeed order this report, and he did it at my ex-wife’s request. Through her lawyer, she presented the court on March 25, 2005 with a list of five names. She argued that the court should order me to be evaluated by one of the five. Judge Kelly ordered it over my objections. Judge Kelly specifically asked that the evaluator provide assurances that things are going well with the kids, and that is exactly what she did. Here is an excerpt from the transcript:

THE COURT: Right, with one of these these people will help me get a sense of you more than I can get from just an hour on the stand or something. These are really skilled people. They're there to help their clients. They're not there to snitch to the Court for returning fees. These people are really good. That's why they're on the list and they will have a sense of you that they can communicate back to me that might give Mother, give me the assurance that we can go right to D and get you guys back on a fifty fifty time line here. So that's what I need to see is something from those therapists, something from a co parent counselor and the counseling classes. And that's the recipe here to for you to get what you would want and for Mother to have what she wants, which is the peace of mind and assurance that things are going well with the kids.

Now she complains that the evaluation was of just me, with no input from her. Of course that is what happened, because that is exactly what she requested. She could have been part of the evaluation if she wanted.

She also complains that I paid for these evaluations. Yes, I paid for all of the evaluations. I even paid for her lawyer. I had to pay because she asked the judge to order me to pay. And now she complains about it!

Publishing the Rorschach inkblot test

The NY Times reports:

Yet in the last few months, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been engulfed in a furious debate involving psychologists who are angry that the 10 original Rorschach plates are reproduced online, along with common responses for each. For them, the Wikipedia page is the equivalent of posting an answer sheet to next year’s SAT.

So now that the NY Times has reported on the controversy in Wikipedia, the Wikipedia article can report on the controversy also. That is how Wikipedia works.

The Wikipedia article is not the first to publish the Rorschach test. The black and white images have long been available here, and an interactive test is here. (Whoops, that latter one is a joke.) Anyone can find the test with Google, whether Wikipedia publishes it or not. You might have thought that the Rorschach inkblot test was obsolete, but Wikipedia says that it is still used by about 80% of psychologists and schools doing assessments.

My concern about these tests is that they are used for child custody evaluations for the court. The American justice system is based on parties to a case being able to examine and challenge all of the court evidence. If a super-secret psychological test is used for child custody decision, then how can the parties challenge the evidence? A psychologist would be able to give arbitrary or biased recommendations, and hide behind a secret bogus test.

The psychologists say that it is unethical for a psychologist to disclose the test to the public. They want to protect the test and their research, they say. But the truth is that there is no research showing that these tests have any applicability to child custody decisions anyway.