Flyer Protest in San Diego Family Law Courts

In late October 2009, one or more people distributed a large quantity of flyers inside the San Diego family law courts. Reportedly they were stuffed in books, free magazines, and other literature in the courthouses. The flyers protest the use of expensive professionals in child custody cases, in particular section 730 psychological evaluators. Criticisms are also directed at minor’s counsel attorneys, exchange and visitation monitors, and consulting psychologists.

You can see a scanned PDF of the flyer ^[1].

The text of the protest flyer has also been posted on Courthouse Forum ^[2], one of the sites hosting discussions about the scandal. Some other web sites with related public discussions are:

• Custody Evaluator’s Credentials Questioned In Lawsuit (10 News main site) ^[3]
• Custody Evaluator’s Credentials Questioned In Lawsuit (10 News blog site) ^[4]
• Parents Say They Are Drained Of Money By Court Professionals ^[5]

Some of the discussions mention the courts sealing the Tadros v. Doyne case after it started to be discussed publicly. Perhaps the courts want to “protect privacy” or maybe simply cover up allegations of their misconduct. Whatever the case may be, you can read the text from this quote in case the link or discussion thread becomes unavailable:

PARENTS BEWARE!

PRIVATE CHILD CUSTODY EVALUATIONS

ALSO CALLED “730 EVALUATIONS”

“AND THE CHILDREN GO TO………THE HIGHEST BIDDER”

Judges regularly order parents into Private Child Custody Evaluations and appoint a specific evaluator. Yet no one in the Court, including the Judge, verifies the education, credentials, training, or competence of the appointees. The Court deems itself “not responsible” for private sector practitioners, yet they make orders that force you to sign a contract and pay for what could only be called a “disservice” to your children.

The evaluator then coerces you to sign a service agreement, medical releases, and other documents, when no legally binding contract existed prior to your signature being received. If the Court is allowed to make this kind of order, why is your signature required?

But you will do this. You will do this because your lawyer (who probably told you it was a good idea and suggested an evaluator), the Judge, and the evaluator themselves will deem you “uncooperative” and imply that you will lose all custody of your children if you don’t.

Parents, WE, AS CITIZENS OF THIS COUNTRY, have no right under the U.S. or California Constitutions to raise or even have contact with our own children. Those in the business of the “Justice Factory” know this and will exploit your fear of losing your child to serve themselves and feed the mill.

Regardless of these facts, the Judge will enter any report an appointee generates into your Court file under California Evidence Code §730, without verifying that the evaluator followed the legal procedures and/or complied with the orders they issued in your case. Once released to the court, you have no independent access the report you paid for.

If you are ordered into a 730 Evaluation, your only chance at 50/50 custody is if:

a) You are paying the “right” Family Law Attorney ($250+/hr.), and;

b) You agree to pay for ½ the evaluation, in advance of the report….

….which has no set limit as to how long it can take or how much the evaluator charges hourly. Evaluations can cost as much as $30,000 and you may be required to participate in more than one!!! As well, you may be “farmed out” to their partner marketed colleagues for “therapy”, “mediation”, “parenting coordination”, “supervised visitation”, “coaching” and a few other “services” these same people provide.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A “COURT APPROVED” PRIVATE EVALUATOR – DESPITE WHAT YOU MAY HAVE BEEN TOLD

* Please download PKT-036 at the link provided below

HOW THIS COULD HAVE HAPPENED?

In 1992, the Federal Government enacted The Child Support Recovery Act. The States were at risk of having welfare funding cut. In response, California dismissed “Argos Minimum Child Support Standards Act of 1984”, in favor of “The California Child Support Guideline” (Family Code §§4050-4076). Child support was thereafter based on “time-share” rather than meeting the minimum needs of the child.

Non-custodial parents, previously disinterested in custody but ordered to pay child support or face criminal charges, flooded the Court seeking custody. Resources exhausted, the Court, in its infinite business sense, created measures allowing the “out-sourcing” of services at the parents’ expense. The Court enticed private practitioners by calling them “expert witnesses”, such that their “work product” was immune to lawsuit, under Evidence Code §730.

With HMO’s and PPO’s limiting payments to doctors for mental heath services that were not “medically necessary”, psychologists who formerly refused to be involved in the Court system, suddenly saw a “cash cow”. The public was now required to pay their full hourly rates for an indeterminate length of time, in hopes of continued, meaningful contact with their children.

To this day the Court takes no responsibility to ensure that the credentials, training and education of the 730 Evaluators they appoint meet the legal standards. Lorna Alksne, Supervising Judge of the Family Court, recently told Channel 10 News that it is the responsibility of the parents to verify credentials of an appointed evaluator.** In other words, they “scapegoat” their incompetence, corruption, and deliberate ignorance on you, at the cost of your home, your retirement, your children’s savings and college funds and most important, your child’s psychological, emotional, physical and spiritual wellbeing…

NAMES

“730’s”: Stephen Doyne, John C. Parker IV, William Dess, David Green, Lori Love, Russell Gold, Steven Sparta, Robert Simon, Yanon Volcani, Breffni Barrett, Neil Ribner, Linda Altes;

Marketed Partners: Hannah’s House, Family Connections, Monika Konia, Penny Angel-Levy, William Eddy, Terrence Chucas, Dave Schulman, Margot Lewis….and more too numerous to list here.

LINKS

* http://www.sdcourt.ca.gov ^[6] (search “PKT-036” – created 7/09)

** http://www.10news.com/video/19987712/ ^[7]

http://10newsblogs.com/iteam/?p=657 ^[4]

http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2009/jul/01/city-light-2/ ^[8]

http://whoresofthecourt.com/about.htm ^[9] (check Amazon for deals)

http://courthouseforum.com/forums/view.php?id=1059108 ^[10] (note email link)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsH-zndX8vc ^[11] (what???)

– created and/or dispersed 9/09 by citizens exercising their 1st Amendment Rights

Authorship Unclear, Possibly Related to Tadros v. Doyne Case

Although it’s not clear who the authors of this protest flyer are, my best guess is that they’re motivated by the San Diego family law court scandal involving Stephen Doyne, a section 730 child custody / psychology evaluator, and the pervasive violations of court rules in San Diego County regarding psychological evaluators. Check my recent articles, including Stephen Doyne and San Diego Family Law Courts Under Fire ^[14], for more information on that dispute.

Widespread Criticisms Typical of Child Custody Disputes

Because of way California courts treat divorces and child custody disputes as adversarial matters, the government encourages conflict that hurts children and families. The judges are clearly incapable of understanding the complex matters that go on in these fighting families in the limited amount of time they have to spend, especially because there is seldom any clear-cut evidence and there is extensive perjury in many cases. Even when there is “evidence” it is sometimes not clear what is real and what is not. Fabricated documents, spinning the meanings of e-mails, phone messages, and photographs, and outright lying about events that never even occurred are common.

Sometimes the dispute simply comes down to one or both parties having such animosity towards each other that they will do anything to hurt the other. Such parents often view children as pawns in their war. So there is a very high chance that the lying party will “pull one over” on the judge and if that party is awarded anything approaching 100% custody, the results will be dire for the children. Severing the connections between a parent and his or her children, especially by hostile means such as parental alienation, tends to cause a lifetime of psychological problems for both the children and the parent.

The result of the adversarial process imposed by the courts is that one or both parents are generally very upset at many of the divorce professionals, often rightly so. It’s my perception that these professionals should have understood the damage this adversarial system causes and how it often fails to reach accurate conclusions while financially devastating the parents and emotional damaging everybody involved. While there are some cases in which parental alienation campaigns or severe substance abuse problems almost demand a psychological evaluation, even those cases may not be truly clear-cut even with dozens of hours of interviews and testing.

There are some psychological evaluators who do “get it”, but even they are often put into a position that they cannot truly help much. Even after they have issued their reports, often one party wants to continue to fight and argue and refuse to accept that the children need and should spend time with both of their parents. The psychological evaluation often simply serves to waste a huge amount of money while perpetuating a damaging conflict. Everybody suffers except for the people making their living on applying the destructively nutty psychological evaluation process in cases where it really isn’t appropriate.

Whores of the Court: The Fraud of Psychiatric Testimony and the Rape of American Justice ^[15]

Booklist Mini-review ^[16]

A take-no-prisoners condemnation of psychiatric experts being waved into the witness box, this account trashes psychiatry in general as a quack profession. Hagen (a psychology professor) assails most of the diagnostic tools of the field in her text, which roams among court cases whose outcome hinged on the testimony of mental-health experts. Her fundamental contention is that psychiatry is a junk science whose theories when extended to matters of legal culpability go against common sense. Indeed, Hagen assumes the posture of that legendary legalism, the “reasonable person,” and her prose is peppered with exclamations and rhetorical questions like “Who could believe that?” which might annoy as many readers as it might convince about whatever points are in question. Among them are such topically current items as battered-wife syndrome, recovered memory claims, post-traumatic stress syndrome, and urban psychosis claims. The average person could easily encounter in divorce and child custody litigation the situations Hagen vigorously complains of, so her energetic attack could gain considerable attention. Gilbert Taylor

Further Reading

Unjust Delays in San Diego Family Law Courts ^[17]

Eileen Lasher on San Diego CPS/Family Law Court Misconduct ^[18]

Amicus Curiae brief filed for Emad Tadros v. Stephen Doyne ^[19]

California “Access to Justice in Family Court” Law Panel ^[20]

Stephen Doyne and San Diego Family Law Courts Under Fire ^[14]

California Legislature Orders Investigation of Family Law Courts ^[21]

Unconstitutional Child Custody Decisions ^[22]

Holding Family Law Judges Accountable ^[23]