In a recent post, Allegations of Criminal Abuse Should Not Be Handled in Family Court – With Its Low-to-No-Evidence Rules, Joan Kloth-Zanard argues that divorcing spouses’ allegations of criminal abuse should not be handled in family court due to its low-to-no-evidence rules.
Family Court does not juries, making the judge the sole arbiter of facts.
In her post, Kloth-Zanard does not address the false accusations of parental alienation in family court, which also harm children.
Of course, there are legitimate cases of parental alienation and child abuse.
But false claims are used as weapons by fathers [parental alienation] and mothers [spousal and child abuse].
Children lose access to their innocent parents without a system to distinguish between true and false claims.
The false claims of parental alienation give the accuser an advantage in Family Court. Most often by men, in lawless places like CT Family Court, it will result in the mother having no contact with her children.
This is especially true if the father has money or a well-connected attorney.
Spousal and child abuse are real, and so are false claims. Once a mother makes a false claim, she gets the advantage, and the accused, usually the father, may never see his children again.
This is especially true if the mother has money or a well-connected attorney.
False claims are weapons fathers use – for parental alienation, and mothers use false claims of child and spousal abuse.
How to decide what are true and false claims?
The jury system is our US Constitutional and state standard for fact-finding. Yet in Family Court, there are no juries.
The Founding Fathers knew that judges could not be trusted with fact-finding and rendering verdicts, since judges are liable to favor their friends, rule against their enemies, and make decisions where money is the motive.
The jury is the check on the power of judges in the Constitution.
The Constitution takes the fact finding – the decision making – away from judges and hands it to a jury of 12. The 12 selected at random are supposed to represent the community.
In a word, Family Court is “unconstitutional.”
Without juries, judges rule, as they do now in family court, by fiat, by caprice, by whatever they want, without adhering to any standards of evidence, favoring their friends, barely knowing the facts of the case, relying on paid court actors like friendly attorneys, GALs, seeing to it that every regular actor’s beaks are wetted, and relying on the lobbying power of lawyers and therapists to ensure their reappointments, and where the judge is the absolute monarch of the courtroom, and where lawyers, GALs, and therapists of all stripes can bend and twist the facts to feed off the victims – the losing parent and the children, whose “best interest” is a true legal fiction.
The cure is to add juries to family court, then justice has a chance to prevail.
What jury of 12 will traumatize children by flipping custody and removing primary care mother from their young lives without proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the mother alienates the children from the father? Even then a jury would not remove the mother altogether.
Yet judges do it all the time when the dollars flow the right way – with unimaginably flimsy evidence.
There are cases of parental alienation, where the mother is removed from the children’s lives, sometimes forever, based on nothing more than the word of some paid custody evaluator, paid by the father, and the GAL, also paid by the father, who recommended the custody evaluator.
And fathers are sometimes removed from their children’s lives on nothing more than the selfish mother’s word that he abused the children, and the filing of a false police report.
Jefferson was right when he said, “I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.”
A jury is the only check on lawless, biased, money-driven judges, and their well paid court actors. The jury is essential in bringing non-profit-driven results in Family Court.
As it stands today, Family Court, without juries, is unconstitutional.
