joint custody studies shared parenting research benefits of joint custody
Also see: Children need. . . THIS?
CUSTODY EVALUATORS | IN THEIR OWN WORDS | THERAPEUTIC JURISPRUDENCE
OUTRAGES:
Bad laws, bad decisions, bad judges, bad experts, bad ethics, bad ideas, and other things that are BAD FOR CHILDREN
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THESE CASES ARE NOT "TRAGEDIES". THEY ARE OUTRAGES. |
ALABAMA ALASKA ARKANSAS ARIZONA
CALIFORNIA
ALANNA KRAUSE CASE, Marin County, California. A "hellish" childhood, placed into the custody of her father, attorney Marshall Krause, who she says was abusive.""If we forgot Alanna was a child, and we put her in this situation as an adult, she would be suing someone who beat her up and who denied her a relationship with her mother, and an attorney and a therapist who sold her out. The same [legal] standards should be applied to kids. There is this illusion that we are protecting kids, while we're actually doing so much damage to them." -- Richard Ducote, Alanna's lawyer.
DEBRA SCHMIDT CASE, Alameda County, California. A convicted sex offender, an illegal immigrant, a man who molested his niece in front of his wife, raped his wife in front of one of his daughters, and later molested another child, Manuel Saavedra, received custody of his young daughters, but their mother, Debra Schmidt, was arrested and charged with kidnapping. For more information, see here and here. Ultimately, after six years (nearly half of cognizant childhood), Schmidt regained custody. See here.
COLORADO CONNECTICUT DELAWARE
FLORIDA
MERRY MORRIS CASE, Palm Beach County, Florida. Merry Morris has been punished by the Florida family court for seeking that court's help in securing her visitation rights to her two minor children. The punishment: $1.8 million and a warrant for her arrest when she failed to pay that amount. The Florida appellate system dismissed her appeal. Merry is now a fugitive because she faces the very real prospect that if she submits to the arrest warrant she will remain indefinitely incarcerated unable to comply with a contempt order she is not able to appeal.
The Florida Supreme Court, in a 4-3 decision, refused to permit her appeal of this order, finding that she can be punished for the simple act of coming to court to seek assistance in enforcing her visitation rights Morris v. Morris. To their credit, Justices Anstead, Pariente and Quince dissented finding that the dismissal of Morris's appeal "potentially fosters a serious miscarriage of justice, and violates the petitioner's constitutional right to an appeal."
[05/01/06] Merry has now taken two actions. First, she has invoked the common law writ of habeas corpus and petitioned the Florida Fourth District Court of Appeal to consider whether her arrest warrants are "intolerable restraints” deserving of review under the law articulated at Fay v. Noia, 372 U.S. 391, 401 (1963). A copy of that petition may be viewed here.
Additionally, Morris has filed an action in the U.S. District Court of Florida seeking emergency declaratory relief that (i) Florida's policy of punishing parents for seeking relief from Florida's family court to enforce visitation rights is unconstitutional and violates public policy and (ii) Florida's judge-made appellate rules which permits a Florida appellate court to dismiss an appeal -- as the Florida Fourth District Court of Appeal did here -- violates both Florida and Federal Constitutional guarantees to due process.
GEORGIA
WENDY TITELMAN CASE, Cobb County, Georgia. Wendy Titelman is the mother of two daughters who wrongfully were taken from her by a Georgia judge September 15, 2000, and turned over to their father after the children claimed he had sexually abused them, and their mother reported this abuse. Their mother was jailed. Months later, the criminal jury was so outraged that after acquitting Titelman, they took it upon themselves to write a letter of complaint to Judge James Bodiford and the responsible District Attorney who had brought the charges. But it was to no avail: in all the time since, Wendy Titleman has not had her children returned to her.
"Medical and mental health experts confirmed the abuse. And what did Georgia State officials do? Against the girls' wishes, they took them from me and gave them to their father. Because I kept insisting that the Court protect them, the Cobb County, Georgia Superior Court punished me: I have not been allowed to see or talk to my girls since September 2000... a Cobb County Magistrate Court judge told me that I would never win in Georgia because I was dealing with the 'good 'ole boys who would stick together no matter what'... Judge James Bodiford, Judge Bo Wood, GAL Diane Woods, Elizabeth King, Ph.D., Lorita Whitaker, D.A. Patrick Head, the Kennesaw Police Department, and the Cobb County Department of Family and Children Services are directly responsible."
Wendy has written a book, A Mother's Journal: Let My Children Go! which details the systematic corruption and professional incompetence of the lawyers and mental health professionals involved.HAWAII IDAHO ILLINOIS INDIANA IOWA
KANSAS
CLAUDINE DOMBROWSKI CASE, Shawnee County, Kansas. Claudine lost custody of her baby daughter Rikki to Hal Richardson, the man who did this, thanks to Judge James P. Buchele, who refused to permit adequate testimony at trial, shortening it to benefit his docket, and also ordered Claudine to move back to Topeka to live near Richardson, for the sake of their "co-parenting." WHAT?! Richardson is a man with multiple criminal convictions for violent behavior (Battery, Attempted Battery, Battery of a Law Enforcement Officer, Obstruction of Legal Process, Possession of Marijuana and violation of Open Container law), a man who has beaten and raped Claudine multiple times before and after her divorce from him, a man who has threatened to kill her and her child.
Worse, Judge Buchele also ordered Claudine not to call the police any more without the permission of her case manager. When Judge James Buchele retired, Judge Richard D. Anderson affirmed Buchele's previous orders, including the illegal prohibition on Claudine's being able to call the police.
But don't blame the judges alone. Stupidity rarely works its evil in a vaccuum. A truly egregious outrage requires that could-be good men do nothing. Guardian ad litem Scott McKenzie deserves a substantial portion of the credit for this travesty. I ask, how in hell can this happen in the United States of America? For more information, also see http://www.kansas.net/%7Efreepress/7-12-01-8.html
KENTUCKY
KELLY STRATTON, Covington, Kentucky. Two dead; thankfully, not the child or the mother (who was in jail while this happened). But how did this mother of a little girl end up in jail for 60 days for contempt of court, causing her to lose her job and home, and rendering her unable herself to protect her daughter, who was sent into the temporary custody of her (now dead) maternal grandmother? How could Kenton Family Court Judge Lisa Bushelman possibly have given this "father" Charlie Johnson any visitation rights? More importantly, how in hell is it that the law guardian could possibly have had "equal concerns" about the mother's and father's parenting skills?
"The lawyer had equal concerns about the mother's parenting skills. While the mother had custody, the girl was tardy at least 25 times and absent at least eight times from elementary school. She was late to school seven times in February."
But the father "was charged with raping a child in 1994 but pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of gross sexual imposition", was "also convicted of two counts of theft in 1989, aggravated burglary in 1989, disorderly conduct in 1991 and carrying a concealed weapon in 1991", and had been charged numerous times with domestic violence after violating several protection orders but that those charges had been dismissed."
"'The youngster needed therapy to deal with her parents' fighting,' guardian Lisa M. Wenzel said in one report." Her parents' fighting? Nothing but a mutually squabbling mother, recalcitrant because a dangerous convicted child rapist wanted his custody rights? How unreasonable of her...
"But each parent had positive attributes, Wenzel said." How could anyone make this kind of claim unless she were completely incompetent.
And Judge "Bushelman ordered that both parents would have joint custody... [the abusive, dangerous, child-rapist father] was given visitation three times a week.... [and then] in a May hearing, Bushelman found [the mother] in contempt of court and ordered her to serve 60 days in jail." We could guess why. Visitation "interference"? Failure to supply yet more harassing discovery? Or rudeness to the judge? Step down from the bench, please, Judge Bushelman. Two people are dead, and it appears that you were a catalyst. You are too susceptible to father's rights crap and therapeutic jurisprudence drivel.
Two people now are dead; thankfully, not the child or the mother. It does sound like the grandmother, hero Betty Hamilton, the mother's mother, may she rest in peace, deserves a statue erected in her honor.LOUISIANA MAINE
MARYLAND
AMY CASTILLO, Montgomery County, Maryland. Amy Castillo, a pediatrician, and primary parent to three small children (Anthony, 6, Austin, 4, and Athena, 2), twice was denied her motion to restrict Mark Castillo's visitation rights. Not only that, she was fined for "visitation interference". Her children are dead now, murdered by their father in a hotel room in Baltimore, March 31, 2008. "A long-running custody battle..." "Amy Castillo filed for a protective order in December of 2006 and claimed Mark had threatened to kill their children to make her suffer. She requested that the order be permanent but a judge denied the request saying there was no evidence of abuse." You can find the case records at http://casesearch.courts.state.md.us/inquiry/inquiry-index.jsp
PROFESSOR JOAN S. MEIER'S ANALYSIS IN THE WASHINGTON POST
MASSACHUSETTS MICHIGAN MINNESOTA MISSISSIPPI MISSOURI MONTANA NEBRASKA
NEVADA
FAMILY COURT JUDGE NICHOLAS Del VECCHIO, accused child molestor, sex harasser, and all-around creep in Clark County, Nevada. The outrage is that it took the Judicial Discipline Commission almost two years to investigate, getting its first complaint in May 2006, and not filling charges until March 2008, all the while this man remained (and apparently as of March 23, 2008, remains) sitting on the bench, deciding family law cases (of all things), and being a member of his county's domestic violence taskforce. The child molest complainant is herself a lawyer. With charges like this someone please explain why this man was not removed immediately from this particular position of authority pending completion of an investigation? Or at least moved into some other court where he wouldn't have been potentially able to sympathize with other men accused -- falsely or not -- of being child sex perverts!!!? Has the world lost its marbles? For more information, see http://www.lvrj.com/news/15474581.html and http://www.lasvegasnow.com/global/story.asp?s=7846463
NEW HAMPSHIRE NEW JERSEY NEW MEXICO
NEW YORK
GENIA SHOCKOME CASE, Poughkeepsie, Duchess County, New York. On Thursday, May 5, 2005, Yevgenia Shockome, a pro se battered mother seven months pregnant, who already inexplicably had lost custody of her children to her abuser three years before in Judge Damian J. Amodeo's Duchess County Courtroom, was jailed on Mother's Day weekend for objecting to Amodeo's order permitting the father to move her children (whom she has not been able to see for months) to Texas. Apparently, Amodeo got ticked off because Shockome called him a "liar" in response to... her perception of what I guess we would call "bullshit" if it emanated from someone other than a judge? Amodeo previously had given custody to the children's father despite indications of the father's dysfunctional and stalker-like behavior. That original decision of dubious merit currently is on appeal. This latest act by the judge seems inexcusable. The hearing transcript does not seem to support these sanctions.
Incredibly, Judge Amodeo sits on New York State's Matrimonial Commission, which is supposed to help improve the way family courts function. Amodeo touts the following credentials: Member, NYS Matrimonial Commission, 2003 to present; Member, NYS Parent Education Advisory Board, 2001 to present; Member, NYS Universal Case Management Committee, 1999 to 2001; Member, NYS Committee on Automation and Technology for Judges, 1993 to 1996 Member, NYS Judicial Institute Committee, 2000 to 2002; Member, P.E.A.C.E. Advisory Committee, 1994 to 1999; Member, 9th Judicial District Committee to Promote Gender Fairness in the Courts, 1990 to present; Member & Past President [1986-1987]; Dutchess County Bar Association, 1968 to present; Member, Dutchess County Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault, 1989 to present; Member, Dutchess County Criminal Justice Council, 2000 to present ;Member, Dutchess County Juvenile Justice Task Force, 2004 to present; Member & Past President, Hyde Park Rotary, 1968 to 2004.
What's Judge Amodeo doing involved with all these domestic violence, parenting education, and "gender fairness" committees? Doesn't seem to jibe with this case, and looks suspicious. We need judges who engender actual respect, not ones who jail pregnant immigrant mothers whom they've admitted to traumatizing, which causes the litigants in turn -- because of the judge's own inappropriate behavior or decisions -- to lose respect for and confuse this honorable office with a man who happens to wield its power.
NORTH CAROLINA
NATALIE GIBBONS CASE, Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. Judge Nathanial P. Proctor apparently believes sexual freedom should reign in the bedroom. He's the judge who a while back struck down North Carolina's sodomy statute.
Well, we're all for "sex positivism" and privacy for consenting adults too, even ones who get turned on by the idea of fucking animals -- but we do NOT think it's okay for a father to be watching pornography while in his bed with his two little kids (a boy, age 9, and a girl, age 10). Judge Proctor professes to not think so either. But then he wagged his finger at Dad -- who, notwithstanding proof otherwise, continued to deny that it even happened -- and refused to assure the childrens' safety and well-being. When their mother, Natalie Gibbons, understandably horrified at what has been going on when these children have been in the custody of their father, and baffled at the complete refusal of the state to protect her children in the way the state would have if some other man -- or even their mother -- had been in bed with a little girl and a little boy watching porn videos, and did not want to turn her children back over into their father's unsupervised custody, Judge Proctor responded -- by throwing the mother into jail.
Demand that this man be removed from office. His priorities are very confused -- to put it as politely as we can and refrain from speculating as to why he's more protective of abstract notions of privacy and adults who like buggery and bestiality, than he is of two children.NORTH DAKOTA OHIO OKLAHOMA OREGON PENNSYLVANIA RHODE ISLAND SOUTH CAROLINA SOUTH DAKOTA TENNESSEE TEXAS UTAH VERMONT VIRGINIA WASHINGTON WEST VIRGINIA WISCONSIN WYOMING
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MORE READING
LIZNOTES | WOMEN'S HISTORY | FATHERLESS CHILDREN | BRETTS CAREL | WOMAN SUFFRAGE
||||| Child Abuse Links and Information||||| Misplaced Blame and Simplistic Solutions
DC's Joint Custody Presumption, by Margaret Martin Barry||||| Protecting Battered Parents and Their Children in the Family Court System
by Clare Dalton, 37 Fam. & Conciliation Courts Rev. 273 (1999)||||| "Friendly Parent" provisions
by Margaret Dore, Esq.||||| Judge Gerald W. Hardcastle on joint custody and judicial decisionmaking
Family Law Quarterly, Spring 1998 (32:1)||||| Attachment 101 for Attorneys
Implications for Infant Placement Decisions by Eleanor Willemsen and Kristen Marcel||||| Custody and Access: An NAWL Brief
to the Special Joint Committee on Child Custody and Access, March 1998 (Canada)||||| The Case Against Joint Custody
Ontario Women's Justice Network||||| Joint Custody -- the Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions
by liz||||| What the Experts Say
A Review of the Scholarly Research on Post-Divorce Parenting and Child Well-being.||||| Myths and Reality
from the FREDA Centre for Research on Violence Against Women and Children||||| Understanding the Batterer in Visitation and Custody Disputes
by R. Lundy Bancroft.||||| Spousal Violence in Custody and Access Disputes
Recommendations for Reform, Nicholas M.C. Bala et al.||||| The Truth About Joint Custody
by Trish Wilson -- Don't call it "Shared Parenting."||||| Friendly Parent Provisions
by Trish Wilson -- What's Wrong With Them||||| The Abuse of Custody
an interview with attorney Ruth Lea Taylor||||| Custody Order or Disordered Custody?
by Joan Braun -- Law student article with research cites published in BC Institute Against Family Violence Newsletter||||| The Psychological Effects of Relocation for Children of Divorce
by Marion Gindes, Ph.D., AAML Journal, Vol. 15 (1998), pp. 119||||| Testimony Against a Presumption of Joint Custody
Women's Law Project||||| The Father's Rights movement
by liz||||| The "Responsible Fatherhood" movement
by liz||||| "Parental Alienation" - Getting it Wrong in Child Custody Cases
by Professor Carol S. Bruch
In response to the PBS Series Breaking the Silence: Children's Stories, fathers' rights activists have proved the the points made in the program by their loud and heckling campaign, including attacking an abused mother and child who were featured in the program, in an eerie media brawl that is metaphoric in and of itself for what happens in these court cases. Read more... And more... Also, periodic stuff that cross my desk "in the news"..."
LIZNOTES | WOMEN'S HISTORY | FATHERLESS CHILDREN | BRETTS CAREL | WOMAN SUFFRAGE
Except as otherwise noted, all contents in this collection are
copyright 1998-08 the liz library. All rights reserved.
This site is hosted and maintained by the liz library.
Send queries to: liz at argate.net.
The above cases are outrageous. However, around the country, similar incompetents and opportunists are making egregiously inappropriate decisions in "ordinary" cases too. The very same bad laws and bogus ideas that culminate in occasional outrages are at work in both. It's just that we see them more clearly when it's an extreme case. But the disease still is in there festering, even when it only causes a "minor" illness: impoverishment, or years of "conflict," or unhappy children... It would be a mistake to consider the outrageous cases above as isolated aberrations, unexpected miscarriages of justice caused only by bad men and women who individually can be identified and removed from power. Because, if you look around the world, you will see in country after country and culture after culture, that women and children are subjugated and ill-treated as a matter of course. So it's normal. And so these cases are merely the expectable periodic lethal manifestations of an epidemic infection. Just as religious fundamentalism and extremism are the expectable occasional outcome of inculcating notions of fantasy as the truth into young children's magical-thinking impressionable minds. And while women and children are at the bottom of the hierarchy of power (or have none at all and derive identities and power from the men they are attached to), there also is a hierarchy of status among men... all the way up to the sovereign. Our system of government was supposed to eliminate this but it didn't do that, mostly because it deliberately left intact systemic inequality among different kinds of people.What has been happening in family law over the past two or three decades indeed appears to be nothing short of insanity. But at the core it's really not so insane as you might think. Some of the more identifiable symptoms of the disorder currently manifesting in family law jurisprudence include joint custody, parental alienation theory, supervised visitation centers, "therapeutic jurisprudence," ridiculous claims about the evils of "father absence" and second parent attachment "needs" of children, the anti-divorce marriage movement, draconian child support enforcement unrelated to contractual marital commitments, unwed father rights and responsibilities, and all the rest of the misogynistic crap that has cropped up fairly recently from a variety of sources. These sources include the backlash against motherhood by liberal sex-positive egalitarians and male-identified misguided feminists; the movement against perceived socialistic entitlements by pro-capitalism libertarians and conservatives; the clampdown on unhusbanded motherhood and women's reproductive and contractual autonomy by the religious right; and the suck-suck-suck capitalistic self-interested (and expectable) bottom feeding by the mental health industry, as well as other professionals and intellectuals who enjoy making fortunes on those who are captive in the system by meddling in it -- from GALs, to ADR practitioners, to researchers, to custody evaluators, to lawyers, to therapists of all kinds.
The one theme in common is "father's rights." What's that? [You bashing Daddy again, liz?] No. This isn't about being fair to daddy. It's not even about real daddies or men at all per se. Or money. Or greed. Or immorality... It's about a vast ideological and only semi-conscious tide of converging forces which at the core all have something similar, a thousands-of-years-old way of looking at and ordering the world that is called "patriarchy." It's about the reimposition of patriarchal controls over women, reproduction, children... Pandora, Lillith, Eve, Vashti... and securing the loyalty of men to the sovereign. One way or another. As women gain autonomous bargaining power and control over their reproducing bodies in one way, controls over them are sought in another way. As one ideological interest group identifies and successfully removes one kind of disability from women (usually because doing so concurrently furthers some other interest they have), another is placed in some other way to balance that. One way or another, all the seemingly diverse ideological groups, with all their different individual and group interests have this one interest in common. And many, if not most of the individual actors in these groups simply see and believe as they have been taught in their identification with one or another patriarchal group jockeying for power, whether it be religious, or ethnic, or political, or racial... And they don't really see what's at the core: keeping control of vast numbers of human resources on the rungs below by those on the rungs above in the hierarchies of power. All the way to the various sovereigns, for whom (or for whose propaganda and abstract rheroric), human beings have been harnessed as labor to yield up their one life and even march off to war and die. But, you know... male warrior hand-to-hand combat is obsolete these days, and we don't have to do stuff any more the way it was set up thousands of years ago...
See the big picture -- and if you're unwittingly supporting even a little part of it as you counterproductively rail against another part, then get this: you can't straighten out one side of a crooked rug while you're standing on the other. Life, liberty and the pursuit of property will not ever belong equally to women until women equally are permitted to use, bargain with, and make their way in the world with the same control over all of the parts of their own bodies and all of their talents and everything they can produce with those -- and that production includes their children -- with the same degree of freedom and enforceable contractual rights that men have vis a vis their own bodies and what they are able to do with them.
"Equality" under the law means that WHEN men and women are the same in all ways, the law will treat them that way, and that when they are not, the law will not default to what is characteristic of "man" as the standard. Thus, "equality under the law" means more than merely consideration of each person as an individual. It also means that that "consideration" will not be cast in terms of standards and rights that can attain only to non-gestating human beings. The law will not determine what is "reasonable" with reference solely to what would be "reasonable for a man;" the law will not determine what is "just" by reference solely to what could be "achievable by someone who cannot gestate;" and the law will not ignore reproductive differences between mothers and fathers where they do indeed exist and have effect. -- liz
