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Assault

A new friend was telling me about her abusive husband of long ago.

Abusive how, I asked.

Well, she said, whenever we went anywhere, he just hung out with his buddies, and paid no attention to me or the kids.

I nodded. How else? I asked.

She thought a moment. Well, she said, whenever anything got broken, somehow it was always something of mine.

Maybe a-hole is the word she wanted, instead of abusive.

A group of fathers asked me to write a reply for them. They push for Family Court reform and more fathers in the lives of children. A group of women lawyers had “denounced” them in a local newspaper.

I’ll use WLG for Women’s Law Group and FCG for Father and Child Group.

 

Reply

Our group was recently denounced in these pages, and we asked for a chance to reply.

The WLG publicly denounced the FCG here on [date recent].

“Denounce” is their word, not ours. We want to use words with care here. This matter is worth all the care we can bring to it.

Some 25 million American children have lost a parent. How? Not to invasion or war, disease or epidemic, drought or famine, volcano or earthquake or tsunami. The world never forgets such a disaster, from whatever far corner of the world.

This disaster is different. This disaster is self-inflicted. This disaster we in America have brought upon ourselves. This disaster we their elders and parents have brought upon our children.

We see the disasters we can do nothing about, however far away. Somehow we don’t see the disaster we hold in our hands. Somehow the disaster that comes from us is invisible to us. Somehow we don’t see what we ourselves have done.

Of all the disasters, the disaster we could stop is invisible to us. Why? Because this disaster has no end, I wonder? Because it goes on year after year? Because it is happening again today in all 3000 counties across the country? That’s my guess. Both the enormity and the nearness of this disaster make it hard for us to see. It’s everywhere. After a time we forget that it need not be this way. Maybe this does not have to happen.

Then let our two groups differ where they must, but only where they must. Done right, our differences could be valuable to our children, not damaging; if we explored our differences with care, in a way our children could take for an example. Just as many of our most successful people, including many at the WLG I would guess, come from two parents who successfully combined strong differences.

WLG warns that courts hear more often from parents who share custody of their children. Even if true, is that bad news? Does a doctor complain that he gets more calls from a patient who survived surgery? Or more visits from a patient whose leg he saved from amputation?

We agree with the WLG about money. Much of the fighting at Family Court is about money. The more a family fights, the more money their lawyers make.

To be truthful with us, the WLG should have begun with a full disclosure of this conflict of interest. Worst-case litigation is a best-case livelihood for WLG members.

Children lose years of their childhood in the worst of these fights. Children are scarred for life in worst of these fights. After the worst of these fights, the lawyers take a month in the Caribbean on money that might have sent these children to college.

If money dominates the fighting at Family Court, as both our groups agree, then what would happen if we took money out of that fight?

There are many kinds of law practice. What sort of practice is Family Law?

Lawyers themselves joke about the low-end personal injury lawyer who brings an endless stream of whiplash clients to court, all wearing the same shopworn neckbrace. Such cases clog the courts for everyone because they are hard to prove or disprove, and because one win will repay the lawyer for many losses. To that lawyer, neckbrace clients are like Pick-3 tickets from the liquor store.

In this worst economic downturn in living memory, our courts are overbooked and underfunded. The courts face steep budget cuts and a flood of new cases. This is not bad news to everyone. It is good news to our Pick-3 neckbrace specialist.
In an overwhelmed court, people with genuine needs can get lost in the clutter. A genuine claim can meet unfair suspicion. On the other hand, one flimsy claim might look as good as the next. For our Pick-3 neckbrace specialist there is no better time to clog the courts. He just might get lucky.

Don’t genuine domestic violence cases face the same challenge in court where most of the fighting is about money? Don’t genuine needs get lost in the clutter at Family Court? Don’t genuine claims meet with unfair suspicion?

One study found that where a new law gave more children two parents, claims of domestic violence also jumped to neutralize the effect. That only works where an overwhelmed court cannot distinguish geniune claims.

We would see and hear about it for days if a bulldozer driver had a stroke and drove through a fence into a schoolyard crowded with small children. But an overwhelmed Family Court is that bulldozer in a schoolyard, with a driver who has suffered a stroke and cannot see or turn. Multiply that by 3000 counties every day, and that is the disaster we have brought on our children, that somehow we don’t see.

For false claims of violence, look no farther than the WLG statement in this paper. Assault, WLG calls it, when FCG differs with judge on a ruling. Attack, WLG calls it, when FCG differs with two women jurists.

Assault in what sense? Attack in what sense? You are lawyers, WLG members, and these words mean something to the law. If you of the WLG differ with a woman jurist, is that an assault?

Is this the kind of assault you would clog Family Court with?

Wherever possible, the FCG wants to take money out of the fight at Family Court. Where two good parents live minutes apart and both make a home for their child, little or no money need go between them.

If money dominates the fighting at Family Court, as both our groups agree, then what would happen if we took money out of that fight?

Would most of our other disagreements follow the money, and go away?

Would more children see both parents before and after school?

Would the crowd at Family Court thin out, and make more room for urgent and genuine needs?

Would the tide of misery at Family Court begin to recede?

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Categories: Law Evolving.

The Nation of Your Birth

 

Photo: Joshua Lott for the New York Times

 

You too can be an illegal alien.

No way, you say, as you yawn at the news from Arizona?

Your yardman maybe, or your housekeeper, or the crew that replaced your fence, but not you?

No, I mean you. Follow me. I will guide you there. The way is long, but at the end you will live in shadows, looking over your shoulder at every step. You will have no papers. You will have no way to work except at the mercy of the black market. You won’t drive because if you are stopped any reason you’ll be arrested and taken away. You won’t be able to rent so you’ll sleep in someone’s kitchen, behind the table, away from the windows. You’ll sleep in your clothes so you can disappear at a knock on the door. You will see your loved ones only in your dreams.

Ready? We begin by wading north across the Rio Grande. With us is Fabiola, nine months pregnant.

It is 5 a.m. and CBS News national correspondent Byron Pitts is with a woman who is nine months pregnant. She’s rushed to a south Texas hospital to undergo a C-section – a $4,700 medical procedure that won’t cost her a dime. She qualifies for emergency Medicaid.

She gave birth to a healthy, 8 1/2 pound baby boy. Born in America. His Mexican mother gave him an American name: Eliot.

Eliot is one of an estimated 300,000 children of illegal immigrants born in the United States every year, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. They’re given instant citizenship because they are born on U.S. soil, which makes it easier for their parents to become U.S. citizens.

That’s because those babies can eventually sponsor their parents – when they turn 21 years old.

Joe Riley is the CEO of the McAllen Texas Medical Center near the Texas-Mexico border. Forty percent of the children born there, nearly 2,400 last year, were the babies of illegal immigrants.

Illegal Immigrant Births, At Your Expense

Why? Because a child is an American citizen the instant it is born on American soil.

It wasn’t always so. Only since the passage of the 14th Amendment to the constitution in 1868. Until then the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court said people of African descent could never be American citizens.

You’ve seen the sign that says

Illegal Immigration is Illegal

Is it, though? Illegal when? Illegal where? Legal and illegal are an endless tug-of-war.

Many people don’t care for the 14th Amendment, for one reason or another. Some lawmakers want to issue two kinds of birth certificate, one for citizens and another for illegal immigrants. That law will go on hold as soon as it passes, pending a ruling by the Supreme Court.

But you too can be an illegal by the end of the day. Come along.

Meet David. Talk fast. This is jail. Two hours from now you go back into your metal box for another 22 hours, where you won’t know day from night, or care.

You can tell David has logged a lot of hours with his five-year-old Jessica. You can almost see her when he talks with you. He knows when she’s not telling the truth, but he plays along. It’s a crack-up contest. He wins if she laughs first. If Jessica is five, he’s four, and believes every word she says. He hears her better than she hears herself. He believes her better than she believes herself. He repeats her words with big eyes and a big slow nod. When she hears herself she can’t keep a straight face.

David is of African descent. His people have been citizens since the passage of the 14th Amendment in 1868. But like all laws, the 14th Amendment is a bucket with a hole in the bottom.

David was never charged with breaking any law. He failed to comply with a court order requested by Jessica’s mother in Family Court.

What is a court order, then? It’s a law made just for you. No one votes on it. It’s a law made by just one person. Only that person knows whether you broke his law or not. There’s nothing much you can say one way or the other. Other laws for other people have nothing to say about his law for you and you alone.

Poof! You’re illegal.

This is David’s second jail term. Last time he was in for three months. The amount the court ordered him to pay was compounding with penalties and interest the entire time David was in this metal box. When got out his credit rating was shot. He couldn’t rent a place. He couldn’t get car insurance. He couldn’t renew his driver’s license. He couldn’t drive. He got work one day at a time. I imagine he stood on the corner with other undocumented workers. He began to learn their Spanish. A pick-up would come along, choose two or three men, and David would climb with the others into the back of the pickup and sit low so the police wouldn’t see. He fixed fences, he dug pools, he cleaned porta-potties.

David will never catch up with his court order. He went to court to request a change and was arrested. This time he will get out in six months.

David would have to win the lottery to be legal again or see his Jessica again. He will live with the threat of jail every day of his life. You won’t see David on the sidelines of Jessica’s soccer game in the September sun. He lives in shadows now, in and out of prison.

What’s the idea, you ask, if this court order does nothing for Jessica or her mother. Good question. You will see.

David needed a photo ID so he applied for a passport. The passport was refused and the agency kept his birth certificate.

Poof! Now he’s an illegal immigrant. Undocumented. Without papers.

We can’t send David back to Africa, but we can send him to prison. David and thousands of others.

Eliot will sponsor Fabiola for citizenship in 21 years, unless at some point across those two decades the Supreme Court decides his birth certificate isn’t legal. Jessica is already five, so David has a shorter wait, if somehow Jessica can sponsor David for citizenship again.

Family Court has sent David and thousands of others back to the Dred Scott era and the time before the 14th Amendment.

Do we sterilize illegal immigrants? No, not yet. Not officially. But would it surprise you to hear a law like that out of Arizona?

This country sterilized America citizens for decades:

The [Eugenics Board of North Carolina] operated from 1933 to 1977 as an experiment in genetic engineering once considered a legitimate way to keep welfare rolls small, stop poverty and improve the gene pool.

New York Times

Not just North Carolina either. Thirty-one states across four decades.

Eugenics means better genes. We were improving the gene pool of American citizens, we said. Cleansing the population of undesirable specimens.

Notice the start date, though. 1933. Early in the worst depression the country has ever known. As Gunter Grass describes in The Tin Drum, Germany began a similar sterilization program at the same time. Were we concerned about inferior genes in the American population? Or concerned about money? Maybe we just didn’t want to pay for children the parents couldn’t pay for.

Notice the end date, 1977. Just after Welfare Reform discovered Child Support enforcement:

In 1974, Congress passed [ a law ] requiring … every state receiving AFDC funds to establish a Child Support enforcement agency ( a “IV-D Agency” ) … [and] meet standards promulgated by the newly established Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE), a division of the Department of Health and Human Services.

What’s Child Support doing in a Welfare bill? Money again. As with the sterilization program (Eugenics, or Population Cleansing). We didn’t want to pay for children the parents couldn’t pay for. We made sure there would be no more of them.

This was new. The President who signed this bill went on record with his objection:

[He] issued a Signing Statement [that] expressed concern about what he saw as excessively “injecting the Federal Government into domestic relations”

So the sterilization program of 1933-1977 never went away. It got a new name, a new look, and a new address. It got a better adress. It moved from the shadows into every county courthouse in the country, all 3141 of them. Its proud new name: Family Court.

Now sterilization is done in Family Court, not at a medical clinic. Its a legal procedure, not a medical procedure. There will not be another Jessica for David, in or out of this metal box. He will die early. We sterilized David with a gavel, not a scalpel. David and thousands of other undesirable specimens.

We wouldn’t feel right sterilizing David for never making much money. Maybe in China, but not in America. Instead we accuse him of something first. Then we feel right about it. We accuse him of violating a court order, an order that he make more money. Same thing, but roundabout. We do it behind our back, like crossed fingers, where we can’t see.

Maybe we need a better name for Family Court. Family Clinic, maybe. Family Planning Clinic. Population Planning Clinic. Population Cleansing Clinic. Eugenics Clinic. What would you call it?

Most of these Davids are black, but not all. We don’t want Population Cleansing to look like Ethnic Cleansing, do we? So you could be next. Your wife visits Family Court and signs over your daughter. Your husband visits Family Court and signs over your son. Once they have your kids, they have you, don’t they?

Poof! You’re the next illegal immigrant. Get to know your yard men. Learn from them. Learn Spanish.

Next time David and Jessica play crack-up, they’ll play through bulletproof glass and a scratchy phone that smells of Lysol and bronchitis. “Isn’t this place scary?” David will ask Jessica, with big big eyes. “No,” Jessica will answer, in a big voice, and David will nod slowly, pretending to believe her.

I wonder if any Supreme Court justice ever talked to his young daughter through this bulletproof glass, or spent a night in this metal box, wondering where his young daughter was? I doubt it. Maybe the high court is too high, and can’t see from so high. In Turner v Rogers the court decided that David (and thousands like him) didn’t need a lawyer because he wasn’t charged with breaking any law. He was in civil court, not criminal court, when he lost everything: Jessica, and everything he owned, and the next 16 years of his life, and his birth certificate as an American citizen. Criminal court would have to prove David broke a law. Civil court need not prove a thing. Therefore, reasoned the Supreme Court, David should not need a lawyer. I can almost see their point. What use is a lawyer where there is no law?

When did you last look at your birth certificate? Maybe like money or a passport it’s worth only as much as the country that issued it. Maybe its worth a Confederate dollar now. Lincoln wondered long ago, in the years before the 14th Amendment, not just for David but for all of us: can a nation so conceived long endure?

Look again. Has the nation of your birth since perished from the earth?

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Categories: Law Evolving.

Seven Foot Six

Is Family Court is a former Eugenics (Population Cleansing) program in new garb?

The [Eugenics Board of North Carolina] operated from 1933 to 1977 as an experiment in genetic engineering once considered a legitimate way to keep welfare rolls small, stop poverty and improve the gene pool.

New York Times

Not just North Carolina, either. Nationwide. Long after Germany ended a similar program when defeated in WWII.

Dog Rescues Child, Child Rescues Dog
Surplus Males: War and Peace

Why 1977? Did we suddenly see the light in 1977, and turn our backs on evil? Did we suddenly decide in 1977 that sterilization was no way to shrink the Welfare population? Or had we found another way to curb the fertility of the Welfare population?

As we discovered in The Welfare Queen and the Deadbeat Dad, Welfare Reform assigned that task to Family Court:

In 1974, Congress passed [ a law ] requiring … every state receiving AFDC funds to establish a Child Support enforcement agency ( a “IV-D Agency” ) … [and] meet standards promulgated by the newly established Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE), a division of the Department of Health and Human Services.

In the years since 1974, the Welfare population has plummeted and the prison population has soared.

… there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.

Adam Gopnik, The Caging of America

What’s up in the Land of the Free?

Population Cleansing, maybe? A kinder and gentler Eugenics?

Here’s the clue: Many of the people in our prisons were never charged with any violation of any published law. They violated a Family Court order that they earn more money. Or an order that they grow to seven foot six and play for the NBA.

When the cause makes no sense, maybe the effect makes sense?

In prison these undesirable specimens can’t reproduce themselves.

Have we replaced medical sterilization with legal and financial sterilization? Now there’s a step ahead! What will they think of next?

And yes, these undesirable specimens are largely of one color. Guess what color?

In truth, there are more black men in … the criminal-justice system [today] (in prison, on probation, or on parole) than were [held] in slavery [at its height].

Adam Gopnik, The Caging of America

Though to its credit, Family Court works hard to rectify this with an aggressive non-Black quota.  We don’t want Population Cleansing to look like Ethnic Cleansing.

We don’t want Population Cleansing to look like Population Cleansing either. We want it to look like help for children. Family Court helps children the way the Board of Eugenics did: by preventing their birth to undesirable parents.

Why would Child Support arrears continue to compound while the indigent parent is in prison for not earning enough money? To get children more support? Or to prevent more children?

So no, nevermind children. Family Court saves taxpayers from subsidizing an inferior gene pool, and from saying or seeing or thinking or knowing any such thing, including how vast the old Board of Eugenics has grown. We would not care to think of ourselves that way.

So no, nevermind children. Family Court saves candidates for office from taxpayers angry about Welfare.

Shall we reform Family Court? How, if Family Court is the way we reformed The Eugenics Board of North Carolina, and Virginia, and California, and thirty-one other states?

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Categories: Law Evolving.

Two Twenties

Do you swear to tell the truth, they ask at the start of a Family Court session.

Wrong question. If someone offers you two twenties for your family home, you don’t need to know whether the twenties are good or counterfeit. Two twenties are not enough, either way.

TLI: Too Little Information.

A professional with your life in her hands will refuse to move with too little information.

A surgeon …

… will refuse to enter surgery (or enter the patient) without blood readings taken within the last 30 minutes. She could be sued, among other things.

A  pilot …

… will refuse to move her plane onto an icy runway without knowing the wings were cleared of ice within the last ten minutes. She could be sued, among other things.

A judge …

… will cut your young daughter’s future in half in half the time. She cannot be sued.

A lawyer can be sued for malpractice. A judge, no.

A surgeon …

… gets better information every year.

A pilot …

… gets better information every year.

A judge …

… gets more cases every year, not better information.

A surgeon …

… will tell you Sorry, it’s not safe, we don’t know enough.

A pilot …

… will tell you Sorry, it’s not safe, we don’t know enough.

A judge …

… never tells you Sorry, it’s not safe, we don’t know enough.

A surgeon …

… will ask what she did wrong in surgery.

A pilot …

… will ask what she did wrong in flight.

A judge …

… never asks what she did wrong in court.

A judge …

… will cut your young daughter’s future in half

… in half the time of that flight or that surgery

… with less information by far

… and growl at you for it.

Can you blame the judge? Put yourself in her place. She will never have the information she needs. Never. Not in an hour, not in a month, not in a year, not if she lived with you throughout your ten-year marriage.

What can the judge do but hammer for silence and bark “Next”?

The judge can’t say Sorry, it’s not safe, we don’t know enough. She will never know enough. She would never open her doors again.

Where does Family Court go wrong? Take a wrong turn and get lost? At the words “Do you swear … ?”

Counterfeit or not, two twenties won’t buy the family home.

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Categories: Law Evolving.

The Wedding Singer

Where are all the personal injury lawyers? The ones called ambulance chasers by other attorneys. PIL, let’s say for short.

Vinny (My Cousin Vinny) was a PIL (when at last he passed the bar exam on the sixth try). He’s arguing with a guy in a pool hall, a guy who owes Vinnie’s girl $200 for a game they bet. Eyeball to eyeball with the guy, Vinnie stops in mid-sentence when someone limps past on crutches. “Where’d you get that injury?” he asks, on autopilot. “At home,” says the guy. Vinnie turns away disappointed. On second thought he turns back: “Whose home? Yours? Or someone’s elses?”

John Edwards, presidential candidate from North Carolina, was a star in the PIL world, winning $60 million dollars for various clients (an alcoholism drug, a botched Caesarean, a defective pool cover…. ). A PIL gets a third of the win. Or a third plus expenses, which can come to a much higher number.

If John Edwards is the upper end of the PIL spectrum, and My Cousin Vinny is right in the middle, where do we find the lower reaches of the PIL world?

The PIL world is a pyramid, I suspect. Most PILs operate at the bottom of the pyramid.

Bottom-feeders, you might say. Not to be unkind, but because tiny bottom feeders, taken together, vastly outweigh the far larger sea creatures that swim in the light. Shrimp are bottom feeders. They don’t hunt. They don’t pursue. They don’t fight. They wait. They lurk in the murk below all other creatures and wait for droppings. They wait for creatures killed in the currents and light far above them. They wait for the remains of the remains of those creatures, drifting into the darkness, making one last stop on the return to mud.

Who are the bottom feeders of the PIL world? Where a PIL won’t get a third of a multi-million dollar settlement and a year of expenses? Where the payoffs are small, but winning is easy?

The wins for John Edwards are neither easy nor sure. He must convince jurors that a doctor prescribed too high a dose of an anti-alcoholism drug. He must study alcoholism and the treatment of alcoholism, then teach twelve ordinary jurors about it. Not everyone can do that. He must convince jurors to favor a doctor over an alcoholic, in a sense. He might spend two years on such a case and get nothing.

At the other end of the PIL spectrum, at the murky bottom of the Personal Injury pyramid, a win pays the rent for another month but not much more. On the other hand, cases are easily found and easily won. Few claims are rejected, with or without records, with or without evidence. The case is easy to make. The PIL need not study the treatment of alcoholism, or the manufacture of artificial hips or breast implants, or anesthesia for brain surgery. The PIL need only hum us a favorite tune, an old favorite of ours….

Yes, you find the bottom-feeders of the Personal Injury world in Family Court, seeking compensation for domestic violence, abuse, verbal abuse.

There the PIL tells us a story we already love, from half the movies we have ever seen, and half the musicals we have ever hummed. The damsel in distress, set upon by a villain, a cad, a thug. Blanche DuBois, in Streetcar Named Desire, bullied by Stanley Kowalski, for one. Dulcinea, The Impossible Dream.

The Rainmaker, the novel that made John Grisham famous, had both stories: the dying boy, cheated by a big insurance company, and the battered wife. The insurance company had far more money than the abusive husband, so only the boy’s case went to court.

Rainmaker has a double meaning among lawyers. At a wealthy law firm, the rainmaker is a partner who brings along a network of valuable contacts and prospective clients. A PIL on late night television, by contrast, offers to turn your pain into rain.

 

Don Quixote’s madness lured him far from home and sanity, into no end of grief and humiliation for himself and others. Aldonza who took in laundry became in his mind Dulcinea gowned in wind-blown clouds and and gleams of sunlight, the lady of sorrows, the Impossible Dream. His madness is our madness. Dream or no dream, this Dulcinea will brain you with the scrub pot if you’re late with the laundry money.

In Family Court, the PIL can hardly lose. The Impossible Dream is not only possible, it’s impossible to escape. Affording no proof, it’s impossible to disprove. In Family Court the PIL sings a snatch of The Impossible Dream and collects a fee, like a wedding singer grinding out old favorites for a crowd that could sing them in their sleep, or in a champagne haze.

Even the shrimp sing, don’t they, in The Little Mermaid, for yet another of our beloved damsels in distress?

The shrimp don’t sing in Family Court. They mumble boilerplate Latin, the same boilerplate dozens of times each day. Mostly though they wait in silence, in the murky dark, for droppings from the swimming creatures of the sea, and the remains of their remains.

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Categories: Law Evolving.

Back from the Dead

Yes, I felt demeaned, I did.

Belittled.

Slighted.

Undermined.

Intimidated.

Dismissed.

Unheard.

Robbed of my will.

Made to feel my feelings didn’t count.

Blamed for my upsets.

Who could take the shaming?

The swearing?

The put-downs?

The loud voice?

The name-calling?

The silences?

I felt battered.

Assaulted.

Violated.

The stress left me unable to move.

Not even my head.

Then 3:00 A.M. one night I heard from Mr Milbeenr here.

It was almost like a godsend.

Don’t laugh, but to me it was like a message from God.

 

Who else could have gotten to me, in my condition?

I feel like I am back from the dead.

I will be eternally grateful to Mr Milbeenr.

Mr Milbeenr showed me how I could take control of my life again.

I would never have known about Family Court….

 

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Categories: Law Evolving.

Community Gun

The communal gun was stored in one of these mailboxes in a Bronx building, the police say. Such hiding holes abound.

In a Mailbox: A Shared Gun, Just for the Asking

That mailbox has just delivered the answer to a much larger question: Why the breakdown in the American political process? Why are our two parties so far apart, and so unable or unwilling to work together? Why do they only work destruction for one another, nothing constructive for us all?

Isn’t government our Waka Flaka? Our community gun?

In the housing project, the community hides their shared gun in a mailbox or in a trash can beside a desk no one uses or behind the wiring plate in a lightpole or in the wheel well of a car that doesn’t run or behind a hallway radiator that doesn’t heat.

“Get the Waka Flaka,” calls someone, meaning the community gun. Soon someone takes nine bullets to the head, in self-defense. Maybe even someone with rights to the same Waka Flaka, who thought of the Waka Flaka too late. Get it first, the Waka Flaka, or die.

Anyone can use the Waka Flaka, but they have to return it.

Yeah? Return it? Sez who? How does that work, I wonder? Someone takes the Waka Flaka and doesn’t return it. Now what? What are you gonna do? Ask around, maybe? Make a few inquiries? Ask: “Did you take the Waka Flaka and forget to put it back?” OK, but gingerly, the way the old library lady might mention an overdue book.

There’s the problem with public life today. Government is our Waka Flaka.

Abortion? Get the Waka Flaka.

Mortgage fraud? Get the Waka Flaka.

Declining church membership? Get the Waka Flaka.

Debit card fees? Get the Waka Flaka.

Another nickel on a gallon of gas? Hell, no. Get the Waka Flaka.

Another nickel to educate the next generation of Americans? Hell, no. Get the Waka Flaka.

The wrong people want to get married? Get the Waka Flaka.

The Zales commercial didn’t come true in your marriage? Get the Waka Flaka.

Your wedding-day dreams didn’t come true? Get the Waka Flaka.

Your spouse dissed you? Said an unkind word? Made you uneasy? Made you feel small? Get the Waka Flaka.

If we get to the Waka Flaka first, we don’t want to put it back. The next person might point it at us.

The Waka Flaka is yours for the asking at Family Court. If  you get there first, that is. Race you!

When the Waka Flaka hits a child in the housing project, it’s an accident. A tiny girl on a swing, maybe, who swings into a stray bullet. No one wanted to hit her. The Waka Flaka is free, but the shells cost money.

At Family Court it’s no accident. When the Waka Flaka hits that tiny girl in Family Court, it’s no accident. In a Family Court shootout you grab that tiny girl and the Waka Flaka at the same time. You squat behind her and rest the Waka Flaka on her bony shoulder.

Can we stop pretending Family Court protects children? That tiny girl would be safer in the housing project than in Family Court. In the housing project she’s an afterthought. In Family Court she’s the target.

We could find out, you know. Take the money out of Family Court, and see who shells out for the Waka Flaka after that. Take the money out of the child custody fight. Let’s see who shells out for the Waka Flaka then.

Am I wrong? Oops. Here comes the Waka Flaka.

###

 

 

 

 

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Categories: Law Evolving.

The Week You Were Born

[ to my son, away in grad school: ]

Hi Ned:

Carol reminded us: 18 years ago today a massive ice storm hit Memphis.

Remember the Sequoia in the back corner of our place on Vance? I planted it the week you were born. My sister brought it back from California in a paper cup. She carried it the whole way in her lap. It was a spiky brown stick when it arrived, but it went higher than the fence before the ice storm took it down 18 years ago today.

How is school, work, friends, love?

I know, this is not the time for love. Love comes swiftly when we make a safe place for it; not while we are on the march. I was too much on the march in my life, or in my mind. Already it’s clear: you won’t make the mistakes I made; you’ll make your own.

One request: Drive less. Every week I read an obituary about a promising life cut off early (this week a writer on a book tour for a great new book) and when I look closer it says: Injuries from an auto accident. Take the bus when you wine and dine with friends. Safe and cheap and you’ll see the other side of the population. Which reminds me: The first time I took you down into the NYC subways…

Love
Dad

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Categories: Since Court.

The Closer’s Last Case

One case too many, decides The Closer at the end:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lindsey:

“OK, yes, if you insist.

“The constant undermining and belittling/mimicking took their toll — I could no longer hold back…… I hit her.

“Because the victim is so unheard, so belittled, so undermined, there comes a time when she too might lash out in violence.

“Usually this is after trying to communicate in every other fashion.

“Then, having achieved what she has been looking for, the abuser can say clearly “I have never hit you but you have hit me.”

“This is very dangerous and very subtle!

“One thinks ‘well, I have…….I am no better than her – I have struck out – I too have hurt and therefore, I must be more understanding of her rages’.

“This is a very dangerous trap for those who try to take responsibility for their own lives….

 

Kyra:

Honey, if I may interrupt…

I think maybe you were looking for Family Court. That would be one door down…

 

[ with thanks to VerbalAbuse.com ]

 

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Categories: Law Evolving.

To Kill a Mockingbird (50th Anniversary Edition)


Hello, what can we help you with?

Are you Mr Atticus Finch?


I am.


And are these your children Jeremy Finch, age 10, and Jean Louise Finch, age 8?


These two?

No, I caught these two breaking in.

Looking for hickory nuts, I expect.

Maybe you can help me string them up?


I am Mrs Grace Nance from Child Protective Services.
We have had a report from the school.


Miss Mayweather?


I am not at liberty to tell you that.
But we have heard from more than one source.


(silent)

These two children have been involved in violent altercations
with other children on more than one occasion.
Were you aware of that?


Well, yes…


They seemed disturbed and confused when questioned.
Disoriented.


Questioned?

 

Its seems that an overzealous devotion to your work,
or what you care to regard as your work,
has put your children at odds with their community.
Had that occurred to you?

Well, yes…

We are concerned that this might be neglectful to these children.
Perhaps even harmful.

Neglectful?


I only hope we have gotten to them in time.

 

In time?

Mr Finch, these children are to go with me.


Now hold on just a moment…

No sir, you hold on just a moment.

You will have your day in court.

 

Court?
What on earth are you talking about?


I advise you to say and do nothing further to hurt your case, Mr Finch.
I will be making a full report on this visit.
We are already concerned that you consider your own views superior to the views of the community at large.
That cannot be a healthy attitude.
You won’t help yourself one bit if you seem to regard your views as superior to mine in this matter,
or to the views of the experts at the Child Protective Services.



Dad!


Do you own a firearm, Mr Finch?


No, I do not.


We have reports that you fired a rifle here in the public street, in full view of these children.


That was not my rifle…


I am glad to hear that, for your sake.
Then you will understand if we verify that for ourselves.



My associate, Mr Robert Ewell, has a warrant for these premises.

You will have nothing to fear from such a search, Mr Finch, if you have been truthful with us….

 

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Categories: Best.

He Threw Stones at Giants

An interviewer asks a man about his children:

What happens to your children, that is your five-year-old and your five-month-old, in terms of you?

The man, an Air Force Lieutenant, answers:

Yes… if I am being judged on my relatives… are my children? Are they going to be judged on what their father was labeled? Are they going to have to explain to their friends etcetera why their father is a security risk?

His attorney, white-haired and bespectacled, steps before the camera next:

In all the 32 years that I have been a practicing attorney in Detroit I have never witnessed such a farce and travesty upon justice as this thing has developed.

Was this Family Court? Just yesterday, or this morning?

No, this was October 19th of 1953. I was not sixteen months old.

We have a built-in allergy to disturbing or unpleasant information, said Edward R Murrow in the early days of television. From which it follows that the same bad news must come around again and again, in every generation.

Said the lieutenant that day, shaking his head and smiling sadly:

If this thing is let stand… I see a chain reaction that has no end, to anybody, for anybody.

He was right. Where officials can take your children without process of law, they can take anything. Anything from anyone. Anytime. None of us has anything, where officials can take our children without process of law.

Through that one hole in the bucket is lost all that we believe in, live for, or die for.

Who will send fathers or sons to fight for such a country?

This lieutenant fought for his country in a new way that day. He won for his country what few men ever have.

He was Milo Radulovich. He was at first just a tiny story in the Detroit Daily News. It might have ended there. But Edward R Murrow saw it and sensed what it might mean. Murrow was not yet the legendary fighter we remember today. His legend began here, with a father who would not surrender his children without a fight. Murrow sensed that we might be retelling this story sixty years later, or a hundred.

Murrow: The charges were in a sealed envelope. Nobody saw them.

Fred Friendly: Not even at the hearing?

Murrow: He was declared guilty without a trial….

Fred Friendly: Is he being brought before the committee?

Murrow: No. It’s over.

Fred Friendly: Then it’s not McCarthy.

Murrow: Isn’t it?

Murrow threw stones at giants. Where is he now?

Our history will be what we make of it, he said.

What we make of it with or without Murrow, then.

Then I will fight for my Alice in that spirit, as if it might help a thousand more like her, and another generation, though I may never again chase Alice in our favorite park, or run with her there.

One day, God willing, I will ask if she remembers our park, so near we walked from my apartment many of those short days, when we had no time to go farther, and six-pound Bella walked the whole way with us, and leaped through deep grass there.

Murrow? she will ask.

Yes. Edward R Murrow, I will say. Do you know who he was? He lived near us at the end of his life. This park was named for a man who threw stones at giants.

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Categories: Since Court.

Called to Fight Evil

No one does evil and calls it evil.

Trace evil back, and you find someone who felt specially called to fight evil.

Hah. Save us from crusaders.

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Categories: Best.

Strike a Blow Against Domestic Violence

What could I possibly know about Domestic Violence?

I have an MFA from Columbia University. Is Domestic Violence just a story to me?

While there I studied with Joyce Johnson, author of What Lisa Knew, about Lisa Steinberg who came to school battered week after week, and her battered mother who sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed at taking a beating for Lisa when her husband Joel, battered by his drug use, attacked. As a single mother Joyce Johnson knew more than a little about the hard choices for Lisa’s mother.

While there I also heard Russell Banks read an account of an eleven-year-old boy who one night and for the first time stood between his cowering mother and his raging father. Though he told about one boy on one night, it was more physically painful to sit through than such beatings by the thousands. Sitting six feet from me, Banks told the story tick by tick in the silent moments before the first crack, while everyone still held their breath, including those of us who listened years later to the story. Russell Banks was that boy of eleven, and that woman was his mother.

So yes, this Domestic Violence is just a story to me, told second hand. As it is for a small army of experts in Domestic Violence and crusaders against Domestic Violence. Like a cancer, Domestic Violence works where most of us can’t see it.

But I write now against Domestic Violence of another kind. Another kind, a worse kind, and a kind I know.

We have too often called something a cancer, and sting has gone out of that word.

What is a cancer? In cancer the body turns against itself. The cells that defend the body go too far. The body attacks itself inside.

In the cancer of Domestic Violence, a family attacks itself inside the safety of the home, and the defender attacks those he defends.

A man attacks a woman with a fist.

A woman attacks a man with scissors, in his sleep, or Drano in his eyes.

A man attacks a child with a belt.

A woman sinks her car in a pond with her children sleeping in the back seat, or calling from the back window.

That we might see on the news. The bodies, and marks on the bodies.

But if Domestic Violence is a cancer, where would we find Stage IV Domestic Violence?

In a Stage IV cancer, the cancer cells spread throughout the body, far from the spot where they began. A Stage IV cancer is harder to see. It rarely makes the news. It’s hard to point a camera at a Stage IV cancer. Unless maybe in the face of John Wayne at the end, in his last public appearance, eaten by cancer inside, a ghost of himself. Or Patrick Swayze at the end, beaten inside worse than he had ever been beaten outside, with his grinning skull showing through. Or Hubert Humphrey at the end, on his last honorary return to the White House, where his colostomy bag broke, and his heart.

Where would Domestic Violence go, if like a Stage IV cancer it spread far from the spot where it began?

Yes, to Family Court. To Family Court in 3141 county courthouses. Where the crusade against Domestic Violence goes too far and too fast, and no longer distinguishes healthy from diseased, true from false, or good from bad. Where the crusade against Domestic Violence becomes Domestic Violence on an industrial scale, violence rolling off an assembly line, violence of another and staggering magnitude.

This is Domestic Violence as I know it. I have seen it and felt it. My sister lost her father to it, and my daughter hers. I lost everything to it: my daughter first and last, who was everything to me.

Let’s shorten the name, then, because like cancer this violence is not going anywhere. It’s everywhere.

How about DV-IV, for Stage IV Domestic Violence?

IV sounds like intravenous, doesn’t it? Intravenous DV. Intravenous Domestic Violence, dripping silently into the veins of a generation in every county courthouse in the country.

Or how about MDV, for Mass Domestic Violence? Domestic Violence with a polished walnut hammer that leaves no marks. The bluntest of blunt instruments. Rap rap rap, and children die inside.

What can we do?

We had the answer long ago, if we knew.  From a teacher who talked about paying vineyard workers, of all things. Who talked about accounting, it seemed to me, in double entries I could not account for.  The second mile. The other cheek.

Here it is again, if you’ve forgotten, as we do again each day.

When you feel called to strike a blow against Domestic Violence, or strike a blow of any other kind, don’t. Just don’t.

In that moment you are the first cancer cell. Don’t spread.

That’s all. That’s it. That’s everything.

Put down your fist. Put down the baseball bat. Put down the gavel. Strike no blow. Be one less cell in the raging cancer of Domestic Violence.

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Categories: Law Evolving.

The Bluntest of Blunt Instruments

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Categories: Law Evolving.

Who Oh Who Has Seen The Welfare Queen?

The presidential primaries are in full swing again. They have two important clues for anyone with Family Court in his or her future.

I have just seen a commercial for Newt Gingrich in which he chops at the air with his arm while the announcer says “He cut welfare and put welfare recipents to work.”

First clue about Family Court: As in a presidential primary, it takes money to be heard in Family Court. What are Gary Johnson’s views on Welfare and Family Court? You don’t know because Gary Johnson couldn’t raise the kind of money Newt Gingrich did. We wouldn’t be hearing Newt Gingrich on Welfare either, without a fast ten million dollars from a Las Vegas casino owner.

Second clue about Family Court: The Family Court of today comes from that angry remark Newt Gingrich made about welfare. We don’t often hear attacks on Welfare now, and Family Court is the reason.

For years and years Republican candidates devastated Democratic candidates with attacks on Welfare. Yes, candidates for president point our hopes in one direction or another, but they also direct our resentments at one target or another.

Richard Nixon denounced Welfare with great success for eight years, as did Ronald Reagan for another eight. They borrowed their attacks on Welfare from George Wallace, who directed white anger at blacks that way. While loudly attacking Welfare, Republicans captured the once-Democratic south and the Wallace vote. Ronald Reagan elaborated the attack by repeating a story about a Welfare Queen in her Cadillac. Republicans won five out of six presidential elections in those years.

In a long battle with Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton broke the Welfare curse on Democratic candidates. How? He gave voter anger a new target. He steered public resentment away from the Welfare Queen and the female Welfare population. The new target? Yes, the male. The Deadbeat Dad. The Deadbeat Dad leaves behind all those Welfare waifs, goes the story. A damsel in distress replaces The Welfare Queen. The Deadbeat Dad is the unchivalrous knight who fails his damsel in distress.

Contending with Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton pushed through Welfare reform and redirected voter resentment from The Welfare Queen to The Deadbeat Dad. With that he lifted the odds of success for all future Democratic candidates. That’s why Newt Gingrich sounds of out-of-date in this commercial, thundering against Welfare recipients. Bill Clinton broke the power of that attack.

Since then the Welfare Office has gone empty and silent, and Family Court next door is booming, jammed, and bursting at the seams.

Children of course are forgotten in all of this. When elephants fight, ants are crushed by the millions, as Nikita Khrushchev put it. In the nasty battle for presidential power, we crush our children by the millions. We rarely pause to count the carnage at our feet. By the millions children grow up fatherless and angry at their missing fathers. Their fathers are priced out of their lives, defamed, imprisoned, driven into hiding, and ruined.

Children too grow up with the story of The Deadbeat Dad, though like the Welfare Queen before him, The Deadbeat Dad is a mythical creature conjured by angry imaginations and forged in nasty battles for national power. These mythical creatures devastate actual lives and actual children by the millions.

Who oh who has seen The Welfare Queen?

Not me, not me.

But I have seen The Deadbeat Dad.

I saw him take my daughter’s father.

My sister’s father too.

And yours?

Or Soon?

Is this a healthy notion to teach young boys? The Deadbeat Dad? Or to teach young girls either? Or does it further fuel the war between the sexes, and poison the wellsprings of love and marriage?

God willing, before I die I will redeem fathers in the eyes of their sons and men in the eyes of their daughters, and direct a healthy anger at Family Court instead, and the nasty battles for power that spawned it.

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Categories: Law Evolving.

Tomcat

The costly misconception begins early. Parents teach it to children at an early age.

My sister and I found a nest of baby birds on the ground and took them into our garage. We fed them there each day. One day we came home from school and they were gone. So was the nest.

Our mother told us a tomcat had gotten them.

A tomcat? Maybe. But do female cats not eat birds? Females who are feeding their young probably catch more birds than males. Why were we more ready to believe that of the male?

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Categories: Law Evolving.

Angel Street at the Gaslight Theater

What I wish I had known…

Like the courtroom in the movie State and Main, hammered together in a few hours by the set crew of a movie production…

Or the off-track betting parlor in The Sting…

Family Court looks like a court…

Except that Family Court goes on decade after decade, like Angel Street at the Gaslight Community Theater, where anyone can act because everyone has said and heard the same lines for forty years, and could say them in their sleep…

Anyone can act: the guy who runs the local body shop, the guy who runs the local pizza parlor, the guy who runs the local insurance agency…

Family Court calls it a hearing, but it’s not a hearing, it’s a reading, the way the insurance guy learns his lines in a reading, reading the script of Angel Street (AKA Gaslight) while sitting in a chair at a table, helped along by someone who would know the lines in her sleep…

If the insurance guy forgets his lines or gets them wrong, that’s OK, because everyone hears the lines right in any case, just as they have been said thousands of times over the years, by one amateur after another…

At a Family Court hearing YOU do the hearing. You listen as your part is read to you…

You might not like the part they give you. Don’t take it personally. It’s just Gaslight.

The insurance guy wonders, though, whether his part in Gaslight might hurt business. Surely no one in the community will confuse him with the part he plays onstage,  in Gaslight? Yet some people do. Some people look at him differently after Gaslight. In the bright daylight, on the same sidewalk where they have passed him for years, they now see him as he looked in the glare and shadows of the stage, in flickering gaslight.

When you hear your cue and step through the door into Family Court, remind yourself: Gaslight. The Sting on Angel Street.

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Categories: Law Evolving.

Contempt of Court

When I talk about contempt at Family Court, I want to be sure you’re clear what I mean: not my contempt, but the court’s.

But let’s judge the law more judiciously than it judges us.

I will always be the last person in the room to give up on due process and the rule of law. In me that is both a disposition and a commitment, by now a lifelong disposition and commitment.

The law parades all its finest traditions in a capital case, before it takes a life. Yet we find every week now, as forensic science advances, how often the law has gone wrong, how often courts and judges and prosecutors and detectives and yes, juries too, have rushed to judgment and given the wrong answer, even in capital cases; compounding the wrong, spreading the damage, multiplying the injury, and promoting injustice on a scale the worst offender could never dream of.

That may be our fault, may begin with us, for expecting too much of the law. But if our expectations should take a deep breath and take a step back, they should not drop everything and run for cover.

I told my Alice to trust this process. I still hope to make good that promise. What’s left if I shrug and turn away? And leave Alice good reason to doubt anything I or anyone ever taught her?

No, Family Court is not law at its finest.

We bring law at is finest to capital cases and accused murderers, but not to Family Court where the law has our children in its hands, with whole lives before them, and innocence no one doubts. My child today, yours tomorrow, and the children of their children a generation from now, like the parents of their parents a generation back, then just children too.

Is less at risk in Family Court than in a capital case? In Family Court where a man can lose the child who is more to him than life? A child who would carry on his life after he is gone? Where a man can lose what he loves most, and loves more than life? Where a child can lose half her family, half her childhood, half her future? Where a man can lose everything he owns, and have nothing for her? Can lose his reputation and his liberty and spend his remaining years in and out of prisons, a stranger and a shame to her? All without being charged with any infraction of the law?

With no infraction of the law, did I mention?

With no infraction of the law, remind me to mention.

In Family Court you envy the capital case and the murder suspect. The accused murderer knows what charges he must answer, and what proofs he must disprove. In Family Court you sense a bad odor instead, a bad odor where law and charges and evidence should have been; the odor of a world without law.

As measured against a capital case, Family Court is a gas-passing contest; a gas-passing contest with the highest stakes in life.

Only with a high regard for courts of law can you see and feel this court’s contempt for law; but their contempt for you can be smelled for blocks, like the smell of a stockyard or animal shelter. Does Family Court see people as livestock, as domestic animals? No. Worse. Even factory farms at their worst trust pigs and chickens to raise their own young.

Where officials can take your children without law, they can take anything. Where officials can take anything, everything is lost already, lost from the start, though with luck you may never know it, never awaken to the loss, never wake to find your girl of nine gone from her room.

Is that reason enough to call this the American dream? Dreading to wake up? Afraid to search the dark for the noises that woke you? The noises you hear at this moment, for example, from me, another dreamer wrenched from sleep?

Would you invest in such a place, make a future in such a place, raise a family in such a place, fight and die for such a place, teach your children such a place?

In your dreams…

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Categories: Law Evolving.

On the Last Day

On this last day of the year the sun is bright but winter is coming and for some reason I am remembering the last time Alice and I were on the Appalachian trail.

Over the years we hiked three stretches of the trail together, sometimes taking most of the day.

We hiked towards Hosner Mountain when we still lived in the house where Alice learned to walk.

Later we hiked across the great swamp north of Pawling and onto the ridge with long views. Alice would scramble off the boardwalk into the reeds chasing a snake or salamander. My girl!

This last was our shortest hike. We went to the trailhead between Hosner Mountain and the Pawling Swamp. We had Bella along (our Maltese of just six pounds) and a deep snow had just fallen, snow enough to cover Bella three times over, so we didn’t get far. At the trailhead (a trading post closed for the winter) we let Bella run. Then on the trail and in the snow I held Bella in one arm like a football. A year of cancer treatment left me with unsteady balance fifteen years ago, and a poor grip in my left hand. During that year of treatment I decided I wanted another child. My Alice! I have been sorry at times, thinking it wrong to have another child so late in life, when my own future was so uncertain.

I went slowly over the snow with Bella, fearing to fall with her, or fall on her. When Alice was tiny and Bella was a pup they were racing on our wood floors and Alice fell on Bella. We almost lost Bella. There was blood in her pee for days. I didn’t have enough money when I went back to the vet for her, and he kept her another night until we could return with the money. He let us see her again before we left. Maybe that only made it worse for her. She thought we had come to take her home. That was the first time I thought that if the vet said he could save her for $1000 I might not have enough, I might have to let her go.

I last saw Alice on April 21st, early in Spring, late in her sixth grade year, and 254 days ago today. Unless I win the lottery I don’t know how I will see her again. I had dinner with my father this week, and saw my mother in her room. I don’t know if they will see another Christmas, or live to see Alice again. It troubles my mother that she could not help Alice more, and the worry and sadness weigh on her, and shorten her time. Stay strong, I tell her, I want Alice to know you again, but my mother is not easily fooled, even now at eighty-three.

It’s time to decide Alice is dead for you, my father tells me. He’s worried for me. He was just over thirty when he decided my sister and I were dead for him. I understand now, you cut off a dead arm or leg, or you die for it. But I am sixty, not thirty, and without Alice I won’t have far to go, and no new life ahead.

I hear of parents in my old Manhattan neighborhood scrambling to get their kids into Pre-K and Kindergarten, and planning their lives around the school and money for the school in those years, knowing the lifelong difference Pre-K makes to a child. When I sold my Manhattan apartment I gave Alice three full years of Montessori, five full days each week. I couldn’t know then that I would not see her turn twelve, that she would be trapped in a stunted life without her father to show her anything more. I took her to Montessori every morning and got her from there every afternoon.I knew all her teachers, the other kids, the other parents, and they all knew me. I stayed to watch her play and watch her with other kids before we drove home. I am glad now for every day of that, every minute of that.

Alice was only three when we started there. She would wrap herself around my knee and cry quietly when I started to leave without her. Marge would distract her, take one of her hands from me, and whisper for me to hurry out the door. She was so young. I wondered. But on my last day I might be more grateful for that, more proud of that, than of anything else in my long life, that I gave Alice three years of Montessori, years that will go with her when I am gone, and all her life.

When she was nine she wrapped herself around my knee and cried while her mother pulled her from me; her mother, armed with an order from Family Court. Alice may remember that and not remember the early Montessori years, but I trust that inside her somewhere the Montessori years will give her more strength than Family Court can take away.

Alice and I were planning a fourth stretch of the Appalachian Trail, one that wandered downhill into the flats, among the old horse farms of Quaker Hill. Though Alice loved horses, she wanted rocks to climb, and we went back to the higher trail. Everywhere she would scramble off the trail to climb big boulders, boulders left by glaciers, and then call for me to find her and climb to her.

Though we may walk together again, Alice, I may have climbed my last boulder, and maybe my last ridge.

Goodbye to this year, Alice. I have loved you more than anything in my life.

Love,

Dad

31 December 2011

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Categories: Since Court.

A Day in Family Court

It could almost be funny…

A day at Family Court.

The judge, the attorney, the psychiatrist…

Dr Ambo (testifying): Yes, I gave him a complete evolution.

Judge Potter: Could you repeat that please, and speak up for the microphone. We use a recording system here…

The recording system is cheaper than a court reporter and stenotype machine. This court is desperately short of funds. The biggest recession in living memory has swamped Family Court with business failures, foreclosures, broken marriages, and fights for custody of children.

The recession has also slashed the budget money for the court.

Parents and court alike want to protect children in these tough times. So two years of childhood are devoured in this fight, and two years of college money goes to lawyers instead, who will spend it in the Caribbean. Good plan all around, eh?

You learn to spot future lawyers at your daughter’s school. They are not what you would expect from television, from The Closer or Law and Order or CSI: Special Victims Unit. They are not swift in any sense. They are not eagles. In the halls of Family Court the attorneys pull suitcases the size of donkey carts. It’s hard to get around them, or to get where you’re going. That’s no accident, that’s the idea.

One donkey wants to move the case along. That, you recognize, is the losing side.

The other donkey wants to stall the case in place. That, you recognize, is the winning side.

The losing donkey wants the case to budge and the winning donkey does not.

The winning donkey will stall the case until everyone drops from exhaustion. Or not exhaustion, boredom. Or despair. Or a soul-crushing feeling of futility. Exhaustion requires some kind of exertion. These donkeys can endure any number of blows without budging. No, attorneys do not win with slashing wit and sharp reasoning. They win as donkeys win, by bearing more weight and more blows. They crush one another with futility, with the weight of time, with mountains of boilerplate words.

That’s not what we see on television. That would make for terrible television. It also makes for terrible lives. Terrible lives for the lawyers, for their clients, for the children in whose behalf we do all this.

And the judge? Forget television. Most judges make less money than the attorneys who appear before them. Why become a judge then? Because the attorneys make money from clients. No clients, no money. The judge gets her money from taxpayers. She gets paid no matter what happens to anyone around her, including you. Your judge is probably a has-been lawyer who traded a failing practice for a government paycheck and a civil service pension.

Now your judge gets clients (so to speak) at the point of a gun. Her courtroom swarms with armed guards. Otherwise she might have no clients at all. Would you hire her? Listen and decide.

Your judge is having a good day. This is her first trial, and she has been lost at times. A Family Court case can be difficult to conduct. With no one charged with anything, and no laws under discussion, what do you talk about? For ten months we have met for maybe fifteen minutes every six weeks, and we have mainly discussed when everyone can meet again.

Meanwhile my daughter has gone from age nine to age ten, and through most of fifth grade. She saw me for an hour the evening of her birthday in a room upstairs, a room with some of these same armed guards and a two-way mirror and a Chinese Checkers board.

But today, after ten months, we have our first witness and first evidence. I am hoping to see my daughter outside of the courthouse again.

Dr Ambo has taken no position. He didn’t know enough to take a position, he wrote to the court.

He’s right. He met me once, for 90 minutes, four months ago; and he has not even met my wife, the other parent.

It’s hard to see how his testimony could help or hurt either of us. He looks miserable, like a student giving his first book report in high school. He speaks with a heavy accent and his English is poor.

I am eager to get past Dr Ambo to the other psychiatrist, Dr Pfeiler. Dr Pfeiler spent a whole day with me and a whole day with my wife. He gave us standardized tests, interviewed us, and talked to three references each, people in the community who knew us as parents.

Dr Pfeiler gave me a favorable report; his report on my wife was troubling.

Still, both sides want to tip Dr Ambo their way today. If he departs from his neutrality, though, and speaks favorably of one side, the other side will try to discredit him.

Dr Ambo (leaning into the microphone): Yes, I gave him a complete evolution.

Judge Potter: You gave Mr Harris a complete evaluation, you say?

Dr Ambo nods gratefully and falls to the back of his chair, as far from the microphone as he can get.

Ouch. Leading, I wanted to call out. Meaning, the judge fed him two answers. I wanted my lawyer to ask Dr Ambo my name. He probably couldn’t say.

We wanted to ask Dr Ambo why he said evolution instead of evaluation. Was his English good enough to interview me?

We wanted to ask Dr Ambo if he had ever testified in court before.

No, he would answer, he only did “reten” reports on troubled patients at the Veterans Hospital, old guys who tended to disappear from the system.

We wanted to ask his expertise in family issues.

One course in school, he would answer.

When was that, we would ask.

Nineteen years ago in graduate school, he would answer.

Nineteen years, we would gasp. Dr Ambo looked like a college freshman, hardly nineteen himself.

Where did you take your one course in family issues, we would ask.

In Pakistan, Dr Ambo would answer.

Parkistan, we would ask. Are family issues any different in Pakistan, we would ask.

Can a man divorce his wife, for example, by declaring Talaq three times in public, we would ask.

But we never get a chance to ask Dr Ambo anything. No one can understand his answers. His English is poor and he is terribly nervous. So the judge steps in to question him in place of my lawyer and my wife’s lawyer.

Judge Potter spoons answers into his mouth, and Dr Ambo nods gratefully, like a child in a high chair with a mouthful of creamed peas.

Judge Potter: But supposing you had known that Mr Harris drove nineteen hours with only short naps at rest stops along the way, then would you know enough to call Mr Harris a danger to his daughter, with his bad judgment?

Dr Ambo (nodding): Yes. Driving without sleep is like driving drunk, studies have shown.

Mr Goode (my attorney): Objection. Argumentative. Leading the witness.

Judge Potter (shocked): You can’t object to the judge….

Still, I thought, my fearsome lawyer (or any lawyer) should be able to neutralize Dr Ambo in twenty seconds:

Mr Goode, Esq: Is this your written report to the court? And is this your signature?

Would you read your conclusion to the court?

So you wrote that you could not make a recommendation or render an opinion in this case? That you did not have enough information?

Have you gotten any more information in the four months since?

But no, this line of reasoning does not occur to my lawyer or his thirty years of experience.

Mr Goode is supposed to be the terror of Family Court in this county, but I find him to be a man of few words. He growls mainly at me, his client. I wonder if his health is failing him, and he is no longer himself.

Or maybe the problem is money. Lawyers aren’t allowed to advertise different prices for different levels of service, but don’t be fooled. Mr Goode was expensive, but he had come onto the case late.

For six figures, maybe, he would turn this case around, and make the petitioner’s false statements backfire on her.

For a high five figures he would get me shared parenting, since I had been Alice’s primary parent for six years.

But after ten months I can’t afford that much. Maybe I got Mr Goode’s mortician rate. For that he gives the hopes of father and daughter a decent burial.

Now would you hire any of these people? For anything? Without a gun to your head, I mean? Would you trust any of these people with your dog for the weekend? Would you trust them with your daughter’s future? If you had any choice, I mean?

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Categories: In Court.

Surplus Males: War and Peace

Every population must deal with the problem of surplus males, the males who consume more than they produce.

Among bees and ants, those favorite creatures of Proverbs, the population is almost entirely female. In times of scarcity, the males are put out to die.

Drones: Male bees, whose main function in the colony is to fertilize the queen. Drones make up a very small percentage of the total colony. In the Autumn drones are expelled from the hive by the female worker bees.

In War and Peace Tolstoy tells of the disastrous (for the French) invasion of Russia under Napoleon. Look at this famous chart by Minard showing how a river of half a million invading French soldiers (green) dwindled to 27,000 in retreat (red).

But was this a disaster, even for the French?

To Tolstoy there was nothing grand about Napoleon’s Grand Army. They were locusts. Tolstoy had little use for the great men of history or their trumpery. He has Napoleon defeated by an ancient Russian general with one eye and fierce headaches who dozes through his own war councils.

Tolstoy was a farmer who saw bees, ants, and locusts every season. He has the Grand Army defeated by the turn of the season.

Perhaps even to Napoleon the Grand Army of the Republic was a swarm of locusts? Those starving Frenchmen had turned France upside down just twenty years before, and soaked France in blood. Better lead such locusts out of France, feed them on foreign lands, and like drones in autumn, dispose of them in foreign snows. Underneath all the hoopla, was that the service Napoleon performed for France?

As Ray Baumeister noted in a keynote address to the APA, Is There Anything Good About Men?

To maximize reproduction, a culture needs all the wombs it can get, but a few penises can do the job.

To be a man, you have to produce more than you consume.

If this is a law of nature, how does it show up in human laws? How does America dispose of surplus males? Do we simply haul them to a dog pound as we do stray and unwanted dogs?

Says a former official:

At the end of 1980, just before I left office, 500,000 people were incarcerated in America; at the end of 2009 the number was nearly 2.3 million.

The prison population has grown almost five-fold in thirty years.

In one form or another, prisons hold three percent of our population:

Some 7.2 million people are either in prison or on probation or parole — more than 3 percent of all American adults!

This far exceeds other countries:

There are 743 people in prison for every 100,000 Americans, a higher portion than in any other country and seven times as great as in Europe.

The loss extends far beyond those who must pay to imprison them, and beyond the lifetime of those in prison:

… approximately 1.5 million children have a parent in prison (2002).

We would not feel right rounding up stray humans like dogs. We must convict them of something first.

But poverty itself is not a crime, is it?

In colonial America vagrancy statutes were common. A person who wandered into a town and did not find work was told to leave the community or face criminal prosecution.

This makes a certain kind of sense. A man who drives without auto insurance can be arrested and charged. Then why not the man of no means?

If a man with a Bloody Mary in either hand falls into your lap and stains your $3000 Italian suit and starched shirt and silk tie just minutes before you address the Supreme Court, he has done you harm or damage, and you might sue him for compensation of various kinds (the clothes, the damage to your career if your court appearance goes badly, your pain and suffering…).

A man walking the sidewalk without means is like the driver without auto insurance. He cannot compensate anyone for damages he might do.

Wouldn’t a destitute man be easier to watch in prison? If we assume that desperate men do desperate things, maybe prison would prevent his damage to you or others?

Wouldn’t the destitute man be easier to feed and shelter in prison? Soapy thought of that long ago, longing for a prison bunk and prison soup as the weather turned cold, in the O Henry story The Cop and the Anthem.

A wise teacher once said money was the root of all evil. Well then, maybe lack of money is the root of all crime. Out of our high regard for the human, we must defame and denounce a man first, and only then kennel him, feeling that the ideal of justice has then been honored.

Is this our clue to the question What is Family Court? If Family Court is not a court, what is Family Court? A welfare agency? Or a dog pound, rounding up unwanted males? Mabel doesn’t want her dog any more, so she calls the pound and says come get this dog, he barked at me and nipped at my ankle. The dog pound doesn’t believe her but doesn’t argue. If they don’t rescue the dog, Mabel may push him out the car door at a highway rest stop. When Mabel tells Family Court her husband yelled at her and hit her, Family Court takes him away, whether they believe Mabel or not.

What would Tolstoy make of this, were he with us today? He lived in the era of serfdom and slavery, when humans were another kind of livestock. A farmer, he looked past Napoleon and his trumpery and saw a swarm of locusts. He recycled old horses that could no longer work. He did not dishonor them with charges of any kind, except that they consumed more than they produced. His bees pushed out their males each autumn, when the weather turned cold. Family Court, he might nod, is where America disposes of unwanted men; and why a man’s support obligation compounds even in prison, through the day he dies.

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Categories: Child Support, Law Evolving.

Bottom Line: Small Government

The first presidential primaries are just ahead, and candidates all denounce big government and Washington DC in favor of small government and local government.

Big government did not take my daughter from me. Washington DC and The Federal Reserve did not cut my daughter off from her father, her father’s family, and half her future. Local government did. County officials. Officials just down the road.

You see things differently after you have your first child. You talk less. So many things were just words to you until then.

You see things differently again when you lose a child. God save you from that costly wisdom.

I was always a fan of big government. The Warren Court. Civil Rights. John Kennedy. America’s mission to the moon. America’s mission to history.

No more for me, thanks.

I never had any use for small government and local government. I still don’t. Less now than ever. Washington DC does not know me, my family, my children, or what’s best for us, and does not pretend to. County government pretends to know, to our great sorrow.

Fans of small government, what planet are you living on?

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Categories: Bottom Line.

Bottom Line: Broken Court

Who wants a broken court?

Well, who wants a broken bottle?

 

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Categories: Bottom Line.

Bottom Line: The Cradle of Law

In Family Court you can lose everything with no charge against you and no chance to answer a charge.

At the door to Family Court you pass into a world without law.

Not quite, you say? Other courts function just as they should? Nearly all of them? The law and its protections are intact in your life?

Nearly all the hull was intact, functioning just as it should, when the Titanic last slipped from sight.

You can lose everything in Family Court, beginning with the children who are more to you than your life.

Where officials can take your children, they can take anything. They can take everything.

Pray God your unsinkable laws and rights and protections never leave the cradle of dry dock, and never smell the scent of salt water.

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Categories: Bottom Line.

Bottom Line: Sociopath

How do you spot a sociopath?

I don’t much care for the word myself. The word “sociopath” is too popular with sociopaths. Why? As an excuse to feel no empathy, not hear, not listen, not understand, and not deal fairly. Successfully tag someone a sociopath and all your duties to her are done, instantly. It’s a sociopath’s dream, that tag “sociopath.”

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Categories: Bottom Line.

Bottom Line: Abduction at Court

My Alice was abducted at Family Court.

With the technology of today, and databases connected across all state and county lines, there is no other way. Everyone knows it.

There is no other way to abduct a child, sever her from a parent, sever her communications, conceal her, sever half her family, sever half her future.

The parent who kidnaps a child at Family Court abuses the child too, and the court, and the rule of law for us all.

Look again at the parent who gives the future of his child to Family Court. What do you see?

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Categories: Bottom Line.

Bottom Line: What Went Wrong?

What went wrong with Family Court, if Family Court once did more good than harm?

Look again at the beloved story of Solomon and the two mothers and the baby. “Cut the baby in two,” ordered Solomon.

The story spread: A court to cut a baby in two!

The next morning five women were waiting when the doors opened, each casting a sly frown at a squalling infant. The court would get to nothing else that day.

The next morning, fifteen…

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Categories: Bottom Line.

Bottom Line: World Without Law

Look again at the beloved story of Solomon, the two mothers, and the one baby. His is a world without law. One especially wise man settles their quarrel the way he would solve a riddle. He makes no reference to any law.

Family Court follows Solomon’s example in 3141 counties in this country. The lives of millions of children pass through such courts every year. Do we have ten thousand Solomons? Or tens of thousands of children severed in two?

You can lose everything in Family Court, beginning with the children who are more to you than your life. Where officials can take your children, they can take anything. They can take everything.

In Family Court you can lose everything with no charge against you and no chance to answer a charge. At the door to Family Court you pass into a world without law.

Solomon was the exception, not the rule. We make laws because we will never have enough Solomons.

Keep your children from Family Court and its Solomons. Your children will never be farther from the protection of the law.

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Categories: Bottom Line.

Bottom Line: No Risk Too Great

Your doctor will sometimes tell you Sorry, there’s not much we can do; we don’t have a cure yet; there’s too much we don’t know.

When does Family Court ever say that?

Doesn’t Family Court sink its knife or laser or drugs into a child shortly after learning her name?

Doesn’t Family Court experiment on live children in ways no doctor would?

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Categories: Bottom Line.

Bottom Line: Harm

A damaged court may do more harm than good.

Some people count on that.

Look closely at anyone who hands a child to Family Court.

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Categories: Bottom Line.