4 ms·

This is psychotic. For one, I intentionally did not use gender pronouns in my comment to avoid seeming like I was blaming someone in this sort of trope. Yet yo

• jessaustin 10y ago
  I'm sorry that your family has had this difficult experience. Based on this thread, one suspects you're too close to this particular situation to retain a proper sense of perspective. No disinterested observer of the USA court system would suggest that the problem is not enough family court intervention or not enough criminal prosecutions. On both of those measures, USA leads not only all other nations, but all other nations in history. Even though your comments seem unrelated to the topic at hand, they might be in some sense a twisted reflection of the common sentiment here. Many comments say, "It ought to be illegal to speak of the guilt of those who haven't been convicted by a court." You say, "The court should decide ahead of time which divorced parents are destined to do awful things to their children." These propositions seem to be at odds, but really, both you and others here decry both the fallibility and the limited purview of the courts. It simply isn't possible for the courts to punish all rapists, nor for them to predict ahead of time which divorced parents will illegally harm their children. In many cases, we must decide for ourselves whether to kick assholes out of our organizations, or have children with them, or do something else entirely. Eventually one finds the courts to be a human institution: fallibility is unavoidable, so their limited purview is all that can save them from creating tyranny. When the courts are silent, we may use our own judgment.
  • p4wnc6 10y ago
    I really do disagree with your premise. My experience in this issue has been expansive, even far outside of just the legal system. The organizations that conduct supervised visitation, for example, are basically hard-coded misogyny, and have caused us considerable trouble because they don't enforce their policies at all, have allowed the father in this case to even bring his cell phone into his supervised visits and take pictures, which a private detective we hired later found on VK being used most likely for purposes of grooming -- and, there was already a court order in the civil case that the father was not allowed to maintain that VK page (we had used screenshots of it in one of the hearings) and that the supervision facility's own written policy, which my sister was given a copy of, said that all cell phones were disallowed during visits. She (the supervisor) was forced to admit that she violated that rule in court, or else admit perjury, because we were able to present the photo captured from the VK page showing my nephew inside the visitation facility! The women operating the supervision facility have treated my sister like she is the scum of the earth the entire time. Basically the way it works is they assume anyone who is ordered to interface with any kind of visitation must be a deadbeat, both the mom and the dad, or a drug user, or some kind of criminal unfit to have kids, and that the poor dad is just being railroaded and probably, on balance, deserves custody about as much as or more than the mom. As a result, they sympathize with the dads ordered to have supervised visits, cut them breaks, bend the rules. And then act like hard-asses to the moms, write up court notices if they are 5 minutes late because of a snowstorm, or if the kid has his shoes untied when he shows up. When we first started this whole endeavor, our attorney told us that we should expect, even in the absolute best case scenario when there is smoking gun evidence involving child porn and it is as open-and-shut as it can be, that it will take probably around 4 years to get a conviction, and that the prosecutor and others will focus almost solely on cutting deals to get guilty pleas rather than have it tie up the court for 4 years and be a big headache. That has been true. The opportunity for frivolus continuances, motions, etc., is through the roof, etc. The criminal defense attorney in this case is a real life version of Better Call Saul from Breaking Bad. He's a genuine psycho. He told my sister in one meeting that poor people should just be euthanized, and then basically laughed about because what's she going to do, tell people he said that? And even though trying to get a deal where the father has a reduced sentence and gets counseling is probably what would be in his best interest, his attorney is taking it as a personal vendetta to take it all the way to the bitter end of a jury trial. He said, literally, to our civil case attorney that his client, the father in this case, is a "good kind of pedophile" and laughed about it. Our attorney's mouth just dropped, and he looked like he might even cry when we were all debriefing afterwards. He said in his ~ 20 years of practicing he's never seen a defense attorney like this guy. At a regional level, for me in northeast Indiana, I've even begun researching into the National CASA Association, because some of the higher regional administrators in that organization have actually married regional judges here and things, and it seems like some glaring conflicts of interest regarding sending business their way. They use untrained volunteers, and some of the stuff in their manuals is unbelievable. There actually are online support groups of people (mostly women) who have been absolutely screwed over by CASA, especially in cases involving child porn, sexual abuse, and physical abuse. These people are not trained in psychology, especially the manipulative aspects of dealing with child predators. And most of them are young women volunteers, exactly the people that these child predators manipulate most often. It's really a disgusting Catch-22. When I look at the whole thing, I absolutely do not see a broad US legal system that intervenes too much as you suggest. I absolutely see a system where regional/county level prosecutors do not give a shit ever about child safety, they try to get the cases out the door as fast as possible, mostly by cutting guilty plea deals, they throw people into volunteer-based supervised visitation services that are basically the personification of misogyny, and they utterly do not care if someone raises a fuss about it at all. I have already begun speaking with some attorneys about the possibility of suing the National CASA Association and/or their parent company United Way to recover some of the extreme legal fees we've faced, specifically because their failure to follow their own rules with the cellphone photo incident directly put my nephew in more harm (his photo landing on VK as part of grooming activity), and then we had to pay a bunch of money to file a motion and request a hearing for that, and put the supervisor on the stand and make them admit to it and everything. Anyway, I definitely do not see it the way you describe. The system basically fucks over women and goes to the greatest lengths possible to give white men infinity chances without any serious jail time or serious penalties. Edit: Added detail about the connection between judges and CASA. < http://www.in.gov/judiciary/jud-qual/files/jnc-apps-cherry.pdf http://www.in.gov/judiciary/jud-qual/files/jnc-apps-cherry.p... > Here's a link to some biographical info about the magistrate judge Paul Cherry for the northeast Indiana district court. His wife is mentioned there, Kristi Bachman Cherry, and she is the executive director for Northeast Indiana CASA: < http://www.neincasa.net/meet-our-staff/ http://www.neincasa.net/meet-our-staff/ > Obviously, this mere fact of marriage is not that big of a deal. But in light of all of the other shit I've seen go on in just the tiny sphere of my nephew's single court case, it sure does make me very, very suspicious about how such an incompetent organization as CASA seems to be thriving and receiving tons of business from the courts here.