judge-attorney cronyism | TALKING BACK to restraining orders

Judicial misbehavior is often complained of by defendants who’ve been abused by the restraining order process. Cited instances include gross dereliction, judge-attorney cronyism, gender bias, open contempt, and warrantless verbal cruelty. Avenues for seeking the censure of a judge who has engaged in negligent or vicious misconduct vary from state to state. In my own state of Arizona, complaints may be filed with the Commission on Judicial Conduct. Similar boards, panels, and tribunals exist in most other states.

Citizens of other countries are encouraged to hunt up the equivalent regulatory bodies in their own provinces or nation-states.

Such commissions won’t retry a case. Complainants looking for fairer treatment or relief from an unjust decision by an independent body of arbiters will be disappointed. These panels will, though, investigate allegations of ethical violations by judges. Those readily responded to are glaring ones: slovenliness, for example, or drunkenness or the use of vulgarities or racial epithets. Misbehaviors like these are indefensible and reflect poorly on the dignity of the courts.

Favorable treatment toward one party or the other (that is, preferentialism or sexual bias), abuse of power, disparagement, and slackness, however, also contravene judicial performance expectations, and they are equally valid reasons for censure. Defendants’ feeling scorned by judges of restraining orders is common and a frequently expressed source of gnawing outrage. Odds are complaints about such treatment will be discounted or even offhandedly dismissed. But complainants cannot be punished for reporting judicial misconduct, and there’s always a chance that a compelling petition may be heeded (especially if the same allegations have been made against a particular judge previously).

There may be value, too, in more abused defendants voicing beefs and thereby arousing awareness among oversight commissions of the breadth and severity of judicial malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance in the restraining order arena, because it’s complacency, ignorance, and indifference by those empowered to make a difference that preserves the status quo.

I was recently emailed by a 50-year-old woman who desperately wants to see her mother before her mother dies. This woman, whom I’ll call Natasha, has been restrained by court injunction from entering, calling, or nearing her childhood home.

The restraining order was petitioned by her father, an attorney who has “unlimited resources.” Natasha herself is jobless for the first time in her life, and doesn’t have the means to hire a lawyer of her own.

Natasha’s mother was hospitalized in September 2011 for over 70 days in intensive care. Natasha didn’t learn about her mother’s condition for three weeks, because her father and brothers, whom she alleges had psychologically and physically abused her, didn’t want her around. She says the physical abuse, doled out over two decades, was at the hands of her brothers and that this abuse was tacitly condoned by her father and sometimes explicitly sanctioned. “Far worse, though, was the psychological abuse from my father,” Natasha says, “who told me I was lying, it didn’t happen, it wasn’t that bad, I must have done something to deserve it.”

Natasha has lived separately from her family for over 15 years.

Natasha stayed with her mother throughout her hospitalization, while her father and brothers merely checked in for a few minutes at a time (always as a group). Her mother’s doctors told her “that there was a 100% chance my mother would not survive. For the next 45 days, I sat at her side and held her hand while her heart stopped and started back up. I was not going to let her die alone in a hospital if I could help it.”

Her mother lived.

Once her mother was discharged, however, Natasha says she was only able to visit her three times before her father applied for a restraining order to drive her off. Telephone calls she made to her mother prior to the court order’s being issued weren’t put through.

“But every time I talked to her, she told me without prompting that she missed me and wished she heard from me more often,” Natasha writes. She also says her mother, who is paralyzed, told her she has to invent complaints just to get her sons to come into her room to see her.

Natasha’s brothers, 33 and 49, live with their parents and have never worked.

Despite the household presence of his two adult sons, Natasha’s father, who hired an attorney to prosecute his case and who is himself a well known lawyer in the local probate court, readily convinced a judge that he was a victim of elder abuse, that he was afraid of his daughter, and that she had tried to extort money from him. Also that she “could not appreciate” the precariousness of her mother’s condition. “He lied in his request everywhere,” she says.

Natasha even reports that she “filed restraining order requests” against her father first but that the court has refused to hear them.

She hasn’t seen her mother, who has undergone another life-threatening surgery since Natasha was issued a restraining order, for nearly a year.

“I just want to spend some time with my mother,” she says. “I am afraid I will never see her again. I know I will not be allowed to attend her funeral. I am so angry, so frustrated, so hurt, and so powerless to do anything.”

She says she intends to file a complaint against her father with the state bar association. And maybe another against the judge who has disregarded her petitions.

Guess how effective that will be.

TALKING BACK to restraining orders

THEY’RE NOT JUST ABUSED BUT ABUSIVE

Tag judge-attorney cronyism

What to Do if You’ve Been Abused by a Judge

“Overwhelmed, Outgunned, and Completely Disrespected”: One Woman’s Restraining Order Hell