Still, advocates of reform say a few widespread problems lead to poor court decisions, such as inadequate procedures for investigating abuse; the use of controversial and potentially dangerous psychological theories about child welfare; and a prejudice toward joint parental custody, even when one parent is clearly violent. Compounding these issues, critics say, is a lack of accountability for judges, attorneys, custody evaluators, and other court personnel, who enjoy immunity from lawsuits even in cases where they make decisions that do obvious harm to children and parents.
"The family court system is supposed to work in the best interests of the child, but very infrequently does that happen," says Susan Wilde, a Berkeley psychologist and expert on child abuse intervention. "Families find themselves in the grip of a system that has no responsibility to them or to the children, that just kind of runs amok."
Courtesy of Katie Tagle
Nine-month-old Wyatt Garcia, pictured with his older brother, Dakota, was murdered by his father after a judge refused to heed his mom’s request for a protective order.
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Karen Anderson, who now lives in Manteca with her daughter and son, still looks back ruefully on her experience in the Santa Clara Family Court. Her allegations about her husband were met with skepticism not only by Packer, she says, but by the attorney, Miki Minzer, whom the court had appointed to represent the interests of her children. "They didn't believe me," she says. "The children's attorney, I was so angry with her ... she treated me terribly during the whole thing."
(Anderson's case is distinct from that of California Protective Parents Association executive officer Karen Anderson, a resident of Amador County and well-known activist on family court reform. The two women are not related.)
Minzer now practices law in Colorado.She declined to comment on the Anderson case. "I am not in a position to speak with you about that case," she wrote in an e-mail. "I have no authorization from my former client to do so. I am sure you understand."
Packer likewise declined to comment, saying in an e-mail, "The ethics of client confidentiality are such that I cannot speak to you about this case, or any other case." Stewart retired in 1999 shortly after hearing the case; he died in 2004.
If the way events unfolded in the Anderson case sounds odd, it should. Despite the enormous impact of family courts' decisions, they are in many ways unrecognizable when compared to other branches of the judiciary, particularly in their lack of mechanisms for due process.
Family courts have no juries, and litigants who lack the money for a private attorney have no right to counsel. (As a result, many parents without financial means must represent themselves.) In the place of the traditional fact-finding apparatus that operates daily in criminal and civil courtrooms — dueling lawyers, and jurors charged with determining the facts of a case from available evidence — family court substitutes a cadre of individuals who make decisions in concert. Foremost is the judge. And it is with the judges, in some ways, that the problem starts.
Few aspirants to the bench relish the idea of refereeing the roughly 20 percent of divorces that are hostile enough to end up in family court. As a result, many assigned to this branch of the judiciary are rookies — paying their dues for a year or two before moving on to the more genteel arenas of civil or criminal law — or lifers without the aptitude to move on. "Family courts are the ugly stepchild of the law," Oakland family law attorney Kim Robinson says. "It's considered the bottom of the barrel. Almost no one wants to be there as a judge. The judges come in with a major attitude about it from the get-go."
Family law judges are aided by a range of subjudicial officials, including psychological evaluators and minors' counsels, attorneys appointed to represent the children in disputed custody cases. The courts also rely on mediators, who attempt to arbitrate custody agreements between parents. Failing such an agreement, they have the authority in many California jurisdictions to make a recommendation about custody rights.
Complaints about how all these people do their jobs aren't new, and in light of their high-stakes, high-conflict work environment, some amount of dissatisfaction among litigants is to be expected. But officials in state government have begun to take the sheer volume of those complaints seriously.
Last year, the California State Auditor's office conducted reviews of two heavily criticized family courts in Marin and Sacramento counties. The audit, released in January, presented troubling findings. Among them were the observation that seven of the Sacramento court's 20 mediators "appeared not to possess the minimum qualifications and training requirements" for their jobs, and that in Marin the court "did not verify that the mediators had met the initial training requirements" during the hiring. The report also noted problems with record-keeping at both courts, particularly with regard to written complaints about court personnel.
Auditors did not address the prevalence of cases where child custody is awarded to a spousal batterer or child molester. But as they were conducting their work, one such case was unfolding in San Francisco.
On April 14, 2010, Shari Rivers appeared before San Francisco Family Court Judge Lillian Sing to ask for a restraining order preventing Derrick Perryman, the estranged father of her 5-month-old son, from contacting her or her family members. The previous month, Rivers said, he had struck her during an argument, leaving her with bruises on her face.
