Tag judicial conduct

In Perspective: How to Look at Restraining Order Judges Neutrally

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It’s hard not to hate judges who issue rulings that may be based on misrepresentations or outright fraud when those rulings (indefinitely) impute criminal behavior or intentions to defendants, may set defendants up for further (or serial) malicious prosecutions by the same false accuser (and possibly land them in jail), and may finally inflict severe privations, including loss of income, employment, and/or access to children, pets, home, and property.

It’s especially hard not to hate judges when you’ve told them the truth, pronounced it politely and respectfully, and nevertheless been scorned, humiliated, and demeaned…with gusto.

Judges tend to be hubristic, condescending, and willfully menacing (even when they’re smiling at you).

To compound the outrage, it’s only their station that licenses their haughtiness. More often than not, their authority doesn’t come from learnedness in the law but is simply a perk of the job.

Though there have been some motions in recent years to amend this situation, most bottom-rung judges who issue restraining orders aren’t qualified lawyers, that is, they don’t have law degrees. They were just elected or appointed to the position and sent to “judicial boot camp.” Judges are trained to execute specific duties; they’re not necessarily educated in jurisprudence.

Some have no education beyond high school.

This may either be a reason to resent them all the more for their audacity or a reason to see them as mere tools of a system that conditions their bigoted behavior. Restraining order judges are told—possibly quite explicitly—how they’re expected to rule. That’s a significant part of their “training.”

This hardly excuses conduct that obviously contravenes judicial ethics. It does, though, make that conduct understandable.

Certainly judges aren’t to blame for the state of things, including the shambles they unjustly make of people’s lives. They don’t level the allegations, nor do they formulate the rules, draft the laws, or influence the political and public opinions that do determine rules and laws.

Sure, judges of conscience could vocalize qualms or defy the system. They could martyr themselves for principle. Whether this would effectively alter the status quo, however, is debatable.

Remember, they’re not legal scholars, by and large; they’re just referees who’ve had certain priorities impressed upon them. It’s not theirs to comment on the laws—and being unqualified to do so, they may genuinely believe they’re acting righteously.

There’s no particular reason not to hate judges if one or more have wronged you. If you step back, though, you’ll see that they’re more like ants that bite because they’ve been tasked with defending the colony according to certain marching orders than they are like people we should reasonably expect to treat us with dignity and charity.

Judges are often power-corrupt—it comes of sitting above others who must kowtow to them—but they’re basically people doing a job they may be scarcely better equipped to do than you or I.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

On “Restraining Order Conspiracy”: Why Judge-Plaintiff and Judge-Attorney Collusion May Have More to Do with Judicial Ignorance than Complicity

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The last post posited that the snarky zinger often aimed at teachers applies at least as aptly to the court: Those who can’t do, judge.

Conclusions in that post were inspired by conversations I had this week with a client, a former criminal defense attorney who began his legal career in the county prosecutor’s office. He impressed upon me that lower-court judges’ legal credentials ranged from inexperience to no education in the law whatever.

He told me that judges often called him to get clarifications of legal niceties.

I’ve been in procedures in both my county’s “justice court” and superior court. In each, I represented myself. If you’ve been the defendant in a restraining order trial (and possibly one or more trials that devolved from allegations on a restraining order petition), see if your experience didn’t correspond with mine.

My impression of the judge’s conduct in the restraining order hearing I was granted was that he grasped at whatever he could to justify the court’s preliminary findings. He didn’t “negotiate” the facts; he chose ones that could support the conclusion he preferred.

Similarly, in cases before the superior court in 2010 and 2013, in which I was self-represented and my accuser had an attorney speak for her, the judges basically did whatever her attorney told them they should: monkey see, monkey do. In each trial, it was like watching a puppet show. The judges, in instances, even parroted back the attorney’s language in their rulings.

At the time, I just assumed the whole process was fixed (i.e., bent as a papier-mâché flagpole), and I know from hearing many other people’s stories of similar travesties that they left the courtroom feeling the same.

What I realize now, though, is that the reason judges acquiesce to attorneys and seem to echo whatever they say like ventriloquists’ dummies is that they’re glad to be told what to conclude and how to justify that conclusion. The record doesn’t have to withstand much scrutiny—few people actually take such cases to the high courts; its “findings” just have to be persuasively plausible.

Instead of having a healthy skepticism and suspicion of attorneys’ (and plaintiffs’) motives, arguments, and testimony, judges aren’t confident enough in their own knowledge and powers of discernment to challenge them.

As my client, the former attorney, derisively says of judges, “They’re umpires” (spectators). They don’t “find” anything but what’s handed to them.

If bottom-rung judges only ruled on traffic citations and officiated over marriages—which is all some of them possess the proper qualifications to do—this wouldn’t be a big deal. When, however, they indefinitely impact futures (or void them) because their “civil” rulings impute criminal behavior to defendants (possibly based on nothing or on lies), this is playing fast-and-loose with people’s lives.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

Judicial Impression Management: What Makes False Allegations “True” and True Allegations “False” (and Drives Victims of Procedural Abuses to Despair)

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“Politics, corporate bullshit—it’s all the same game of impression management.”

—House of Lies

What do political spin-doctoring, corporate PR, government-sponsored science, and judicial rulings have in common?

Each is about impression management, the selective representation of facts to create a composite “truth” that suits a particular set of social, political, and/or economic imperatives.

Pols and corporations engage in flimflam to win votes and increase profit shares. Science, too, seeks acclaim and profit, and judicial motives aren’t so different. Judges know what’s expected of them, and they know how to interpret information to satisfy expectations.

The general context of discussions on this blog is the issuance of restraining orders, an arena of law that receives little scrutiny either from within the system or from the public; there is no oversight. Judges are moreover licensed to rule according to their discretion, so their latitude for impression management is broad. Any set of facts or plausible fictions can be rendered damning with a little rhetorical footwork, which needn’t be subtle—skewed rulings more often suggest clog dancing than ballet.

Nobody’s paying attention anyhow, except to make sure judges are fulfilling their mandate to make government look good and keep special interest groups mollified.

Since judges can rule however they want, and since they know that very well, they don’t even have to lie, per se, just massage the facts a little. It’s all about which facts are emphasized and which facts are suppressed, how select facts are interpreted, and whether “fear” can be reasonably inferred from those interpretations. A restraining order ruling can only be construed as “wrong” if it can be demonstrated that it violated statutory law (or the source that that law must answer to: the Constitution). There are no “mistakes,” only the very exceptional “over-reach.”

The restraining order process is the product of lobbying by special interest groups (collectively called “feminism”), which have secured government favor in recent decades, and this favor has conditioned how judges manage impressions. Favoring special interest groups has translated into the investment of billions, which has directed trends in social science research (including monetarily), swayed public opinion, and besides conditioned police and judicial impulses and priorities, thereby determining how allegations ranging from harassment to violent and/or sexual assault are credited and acted upon by officers of the justice system.

A crude evolutionary précis (not necessarily chronological) might look something like this:

  • Feminism gets the nod;
  • legislation is passed enacting restraining orders;
  • further legislation is passed making them more stringent and punitive;
  • additional legislation is passed: domestic violence acts and statutes, stalking statutes, etc.;
  • the definition of “domestic violence” is broadened to be inclusive of almost anything that can be construed as “abusive” according to judicial discretion;
  • the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is passed;
  • a special office of the Justice Department is established;
  • billions of dollars of federal monies are doled out in the form of grants to police departments and the courts to beef up arrest policies and “train” judges and police officers how to interpret allegations of violence or merely “fear”;
  • and the popular press is enlisted, knowingly or not, to flak the whole business.

Impression management marks the standard operating procedure from top to bottom.

Feminism’s foot soldiers in the blogosphere and on social media, finally, spread the “good word,” and John and Jane Doe believe what they’re told—unless or until they’re torturously disabused of their illusions. Stories like those you’ll find here are often the stories of average people who’ve been publicly maligned and have maddeningly discovered that “the truth” is whatever the system chooses to enter into the record.

To conclude this abstract litany with a concrete illustration, consider these stories, published six months apart (“Son of Whitestown judge charged with animal cruelty” and “Judge’s son pleads guilty to taping kitten ‘inhumanely’”):

The difference you’ll detect between the two versions of the facts and how they’re interpreted exemplifies impression management.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

False Restraining Orders That Allege Emotional Abuse ARE Emotional Abuse

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A theme that emerges upon consideration of restraining order abuse is lack of empathy—from impulsive or false accusers and from those who abet them. Plaintiffs who act either spitefully or viciously seldom appreciate the ramifications of their actions. They may possess what we call a normal conscience but either don’t think or, in the heat of the moment, don’t care.

The horror is that this same indifference extends not only to authorities and officers of the court but to feminist advocates for restraining orders and the public at large, who are persuaded that the gravity of violence against women trivializes all other considerations. Their indifference may in fact be unconsciousness, but when people’s livelihoods and lives are at stake, unconsciousness is no more pardonable.

It’s ironic that the focus of those who should be most sensitized to injustice is so narrow. Ironic, moreover, is that “emotional abuse” is frequently a component of state definitions of domestic violence. The state recognizes the harm of emotional violence done in the home but conveniently regards the same conduct as harmless when it uses the state as its instrument.

From “Are You a Victim of Emotional Abuse?” by Cathy Meyer:

Emotional abuse is used to control, degrade, humiliate, and punish a spouse. While emotional abuse differs from physical abuse, the end result is the same….

Note the writer’s conclusion that emotional abuse is equivalent to violence in its effects.

Her orientation, of course, is toward victims of domestic violence, but her judgment is just as applicable to false allegations, whose intent is to “control, degrade, humiliate, and punish.”

Plainly the motive of most reasonable feminist arguments and appeals, at least as that motive is understood by those making them, is to induce empathic understanding. They want people to care.

Here’s yet another irony. Too often the perspectives of those who decry injustices are partisan. Feminists themselves are liable to see only one side.

“But my side’s more important” isn’t a rebuttal but a confirmation of chauvinism.

In the explication quoted above, the writer compares the conduct of emotional abusers to that of prison guards toward prisoners of war, who use psychological torment to achieve compliance from their wards. Consider that victims of false allegations may literally be imprisoned.

Consider further some of the tactics that Ms. Meyer identifies as emotionally abusive:

  • Isolating a spouse from friends and family.
  • Discourag[ing] any independent activities such as work; taking classes or activities with friends.
  • If the spouse does not give into the control, they are threatened, harassed, punished, and intimidated by the abuser.
  • Us[ing] the children to gain control by undermining the other parent’s authority or threatening to leave and take the children.
  • Control[ling] all the financial decisions, refus[ing] to listen to their partner’s opinion, withhold[ing] important financial information and mak[ing] their spouse live on limited resources.
  • Mak[ing] all major decisions such as where to live, how to furnish the home, and what type of automobile to drive.

Now consider the motives of false allegations and their certain and potential effects: isolation, termination of employment and impediment to or negation of employability, inaccessibility to children (who are used as leverage), and being forced to live on limited means (while possibly being required under threat of punishment to provide spousal and child support) and perhaps being left with no home to furnish or automobile to drive at all.

The correspondence is obvious…if you’re looking for it. Opponents of emotional abuse need to recognize it in all of its manifestations, because the expectation of empathy is only justified if it’s reciprocated.

Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com