February | 2019 | judicialsupport

27 Feb 2019

Will a Philly woman lose her home because of Family Court delays?

It seemed almost too good to be true: Mary Beth Novak found a job in Montgomery County as a police officer and a home she could afford in Royersford, in a good school district, just in time for her daughter to start fifth grade. No more scrambling to arrange transportation from her Northeast Philadelphia home to Catholic school in Bucks County — a commute that went from difficult last year to impossible now that Novak works out of town.

Now this dream, which seemed tantalizingly close, is vanishing like a mirage. Novak is bracing to back out of the house purchase, and lose close to $8,000 — her deposit and related costs. And she still isn’t sure where her daughter will be going to school next month, or how she’ll get her there.

The problem is that even though she has primary custody and support from a counselor who Novak and her ex had agreed to defer to in case of disputes, her daughter’s father has opposed the move that would take her an hour’s drive away. And, though Philadelphia Family Court is required under state law to provide an expedited hearing to resolve relocation disputes, her court date is not until next March.

“I had no idea all this stuff could happen,” Novak said. “I don’t know what to do.”

Novak is one of thousands of parents affected by a backlog in the court’s Domestic Relations section that attorneys call “unconscionable,” “tragic,” and “unbearable,” given that in some cases parents are being denied access to their children, or are losing jobs and homes while they wait for the court to weigh in.

“It’s extremely frustrating for the parents, but also really tragic for the children,” said Susan Pearlstein, co-supervisor of the Family Law Unit at Philadelphia Legal Assistance. “Things become so contentious and stressful when you have to deal with this lack of access and waiting to go though the court. The impact on children can’t be overstated.”

Attorneys who work in the system point to a slew of contributing factors: a shortage of judges and other staff; inadequate opportunities for emergency hearings; inefficient processes that allow cases to bounce almost endlessly between courtrooms; and the foibles of elected judges who may have little or no experience in family law.

Seven lawyers who practice in the court said court dates are now being set nine months or more in the future. (Family Court dockets are not accessible to the public.) A spokesperson for the court, Martin O’Rourke, said he did “not believe” there is a nine-month backlog but said any delays are due to vacancies on the bench.

“They’re working diligently, and doing the best they can being two judges short,” O’Rourke said, adding that as of Tuesday, Judge Stella Tsai is going to be temporarily reassigned to the court for six months to help work through the backlog.

Family Court has been down a judge since January 2016, when Judge Angeles Roca was suspended for intervening in a tax case involving her son. Her seat, one of six vacancies in Philadelphia, has been officially open since November 2017. A spokesperson for Gov. Wolf, who must nominate replacement judges for state Senate approval, said in an email that “discussions with the Senate are ongoing.”

Making matters worse, Judge Mark Cohen — the former state representative elected as judge in 2015, despite a not-recommended rating from the Bar Association and no experience in practicing law — has been on an extended leave since May 15 and expected to be out until sometime in October. He had been specially assigned to handle relocation cases.

O’Rourke said that up until Cohen took ill in May, relocation cases were being heard within two months. Now, he added, the court is working quickly to prioritize and reschedule these cases.

Gary Mezzy, Novak’s lawyer, noted that state rules require expedited hearings in relocation cases. “I’ve seen this rule followed in every other local county,” he said. “This constitutes a major statutory violation of litigants’ rights.”

A lack of resources

In 2017, there were 76,000 filings in Philadelphia Family Court’s Domestic Relations section, including 21,800 custody filings in Philadelphia.

Lawyers say that’s an extraordinary workload for the designated quota of just 11 judges.

A judicial-needs assessment conducted by the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts last year found that the court has approximately the correct number of judges for its caseload.

But that doesn’t account for complicating factors, like the fact that more than 85 percent of people appearing in Family Court don’t have lawyers, which drags out proceedings.

“There’s a lack of resources on a lot of levels,” Pearlstein said, noting, for example, that there are just two Spanish-language interpreters at Family Court. For families speaking other languages, delays related to getting an interpreter are even more problematic.

Attorneys say delays go well beyond relocation cases and began long before the current vacancies.

Sarah Katz, of Temple’s Family Law Litigation Clinic, said that, in recent years, the court has increased the ranks of its custody masters, lower-level officials who can resolve a limited number of issues. That helped, she said.

“But the things that need to go in front of a judge are things like requests for primary custody, which usually means there’s something serious going on — some accusation of domestic violence, child abuse, substance abuse. There’s some urgency to the situation, and those are the types of cases that aren’t being heard.”

Megan Watson, a lawyer with Berner Klaw & Watson, has been collecting examples. In one recent case, a party filed a complaint for custody in September 2017. They appeared before a custody master, where they agreed to a temporary custody order in November 2017. A judge trial was scheduled for August 2018, and then, due to a conflict, was rescheduled for March 2019.

By contrast, state rules set much shorter deadlines: 180 days after filing for a judge trial to be scheduled, 90 days after that for the judge trial to occur, and 15 days after that for a judge to issue a decision.

“They never do that, and nobody enforces it,” lawyer Richard Bost said. “Eight months for a hearing to be scheduled in front of a judge has probably been the norm for the last three years or so.”

There is a process to request an emergency hearing for issues that can’t wait.

The problem is, Pearlstein said, “in order to get an emergency, a child has to be practically dying.”

Recently, she was denied an emergency hearing for a woman who had primary custody of an 8-month-old, but who had not seen the child in a month because the father, who was supposed to have custody on weekends only, was withholding access. Also not considered an emergency was a case in which a third party with no custody claim was keeping a child from its parents — even though doing so could be considered “interference with the custody of a child,” a felony under Pennsylvania law.

Some of those cases would qualify for expedited hearings, lawyers said. But it can take six or eight weeks to get an expedited date — and, because they’re generally very brief hearings without time for full testimony, the orders made there are only temporary.

In cases like Novak’s, expedited hearings aren’t much help. Hers is scheduled for Aug. 29, a full month after the scheduled closing on her house and two days after her daughter was to start at her new school. Even if she does follow through with the hearing and get permission to relocate temporarily, she might be forced to move back to Philadelphia at her full hearing in March.

Pearlstein said that’s happened before, sometimes in the case of clients fleeing domestic violence or homelessness.

“Their option is to give the child to the other parent in the interim, or come back and be homeless and figure out what to do,” she said.

In other cases, the delays effectively mean parents never get to argue their case.

Lawyer Ann Funge said that was the case for a client of hers: His ex had moved with their kids to Bucks County, even though it meant he could only see them every other weekend, instead of every day.

After a year waiting to see a judge, he decided fighting was no longer in the best interest of his children.

“They were already taken away from their school, away from their friends, and they’ve reestablished themselves someplace else,” Funge said.

Further bogging down the system, lawyers say, is the way in which some judges manage their courtrooms.

Diana Pivenshteyn, a mother of two from Somerton, first appeared in Family Court in March 2017 in a custody dispute with her estranged husband. That hearing was continued to November. After the judge had to move on to other matters, she gave a new date: this coming August. To this day, no permanent custody order has been put in place for her daughters, who are 2 and 7.

Pivenshteyn said she’s borrowed thousands of dollars to pay for representation for these ongoing court dates.

“This is my nightmare for two years,” she said.

‘Hard to fix a broken system’

Court administrators and lawyers agree that filling the vacancies would be an important first step.

“But it’s not just about the vacancies. There are other underlying problems,” said Watson, the lawyer with Berner Klaw & Watson. “It is very hard to fix a broken system when you are dealing with so many people. I get that.”

She and others said there’s a need for more staff at all levels, for an emergency-hearing system that addresses what they say are often real, emergent crises, but also for a more thoughtful structuring of the courthouse. (In the bigger picture, she said, it also underscores the need for merit-based selection of judges.)

For example, although state rules outline a “one family, one judge” policy, in Philadelphia, cases frequently bounce between courtrooms. That means a judge may be reluctant to make a decision stepping on another’s toes, or he may have to tread ground already covered at previous hearings. It also means a parent who doesn’t like a judge’s decision can simply file a new petition for custody and hope for a different judge.

“One of the problems is repeat filings, and the court has taken no action to reduce those,” lawyer Lawrence Abel said.

O’Rourke, the spokesperson for the court, said the court is also building a custody mediation center at the courthouse to provide affordable access to mediation and, hopefully, resolve more disputes without a judge.

Watson said that, given the outsize effects of stress and anxiety on a child’s developing brain, it’s an urgent problem.

“You can think of the ways a child would be impacted by not knowing, ‘Where am I going to live?’ ” she said. “If there is any case that should be decided quickly, it’s custody.”

By Samantha Melamed and published in The Philadelphia Inquirer on July 18, 2018 and can be found here.

Posted in My Articles and tagged abortion, academy, adoption, alimony, america, american, attorney, baby, bill, birth control, born, case, child, children, choice, choose, christian, christianity, church, client, cohabitation, cohen, common law, condom, conservative, contraception, counter, court, culture, cushing, custody, dad, daddy, data, defendant, degrasse, divorce, dogma, economics, Experiment, faith, family, father, faye, first, gay, health, heteosexual, heterosexual, homosexual, ill, insurance, james, judge, kidnap, law, lawyer, Leah, liberal, Libresco, life, litigation, man, marriage, men, misconduct, mom, momma, mommy, mother, neil, no fault, nye, observation, office, palimony, parent, Patheo, peer, pennsylvania, philadelphia, physics, plaintiff, policy, progress, public, rape, religion, reproduction, reproductive, research, review, revolution, riva, same, same-sex, science, scientific, scientism, scientist, sex, sexual, sin, social, straight, study, SUE, suit, support, terminate, things, tyson, voegeli, war, whale, white, woman, women, worldview | Leave a comment

Every now and again I come across a fantastic article the warrants posting here; I recently came across one in Splice Today which, I thought, was pretty insightful. Be edified.

People care more about how you talk than how you act. The media still doesn’t get it.

I’m not that similar to Donald Trump, though we are both white and older American men. And yet, the reception of Trump helps me understand a bit about my own reception. People are opposed to many of his policies, as well they should be. But what drives the continual revulsion, on The Washington Post opinion page or in the faculty lounge, is the way he talks: loosely, hyperbolically, improvisationally: in short, “inappropriately.” A stray quip about Boris Johnson and Teresa May constitutes, on CNN, a crisis similar in many ways to separating parents from children at the border, or something that arouses moral outrage to a similar pitch. Tweeting an insult at Kim Jong-un is greeted as tantamount to a declaration of nuclear war. Obviously, it was no such thing.

I thought this kind of liberal-world-order prissiness could not really survive years of Trump, that people would get used to his style of talking or simply grow tired of responding continually to the verbal transgressions and realize that the relation of his words to the concrete actions of his administration is strained and complex. He’s concealing what they’re doing, or distracting from it, or suddenly revealing it, but you’ve got to let the words wash over you to detect the realities underneath. He hurls insults at everyone, then making up with them 10 minutes later if they’ll have him. Completely characteristically, he went into the NATO meeting hinting at American withdrawal, and came out praising NATO, leading the Post to insanely contradictory headlines on consecutive days. All they had to do was maintain their composure in the face of the quips and concentrate on actual changes, if any, on the ground.

Since boyhood, I’ve expressed myself in a style that’s similar to Trump’s in a number of respects, though possibly more pretentious. When people are having a conversation I find mechanical—a political conversation, for example—where each person is expressing themselves in the commonplace terms of their demographic segment, or where I know what someone is going to say before they say it, I try to throw a wrench into the works by saying something odd or provocative. When all the people around me or like me seem to agree about something, I find a way to disagree, even if I don’t. I like to talk extremely loosely, cuss almost randomly, tweak the conversation by using prohibited words. I do a lot of Devil’s advocating, and my sincere positions are kind of extreme and eccentric.

For many years, I held on to the naive faith that people would find that charming or fun: useful and stimulating in a conversation, kind of helping people think and talk. I thought I’d often be saying what people actually thought, but felt they couldn’t say, and that they’d sort of appreciate it, and after awhile they’d see by my actions that I was basically a responsible person underneath, even if I was using the wrong words.

I was wrong about this. People dismissed me as a racist, sexist or homophobe on the basis of wrong words, without regard to what I was actually saying or trying to do. People were offended by jokes I thought were hilarious, and do not, in general, have a radar for irony or sarcasm.

People care more about how you talk than how you act. Most want everyone to talk the same way, right down to actually producing the same sentences. Above all, people want to live in a simulation, in which no one says what they actually think. That’s their picture of a just society, or of a “liberal world order.”

They want leaders, friends, neighbors, and spouses who speak like automata, or parrots, or playback devices. They want to understand political leaders as abstract functions, or as algorithms for the production of safe or reassuring and empty words. They yearn for a leader who sticks to the teleprompter, and they can’t understand one who does not. They can’t interpret the way Trump talks plausibly or reasonably. Over and over they reveal who they are and what they want as they say (as Mika Brzezinski has been saying continuously for two years), “This is not normal.” They’re people who aspire to normalcy and relentlessly demand it from others. They care more about how things and people and themselves appear than how they are; they care more about what people say than who people are or how they behave; they want to live in a simulated world where everything seems to be safe and under control. They care more about that than things actually being safe and under control.

The reception of Trump gives me some insight on the reception of myself, blown up to a huge scale. When they really got a load of him riffing and joking his way through a campaign rally, people like David Brooks and dozens of others were bewildered, unable to parse. They couldn’t distinguish the casual quips from the serious positions, couldn’t generate a plausible interpretation of the hyperbole. They diagnosed him on the basis of his verbal style as actually insane, a line that all anti-Trumpers were pushing for some time. Or, in a demonstration of their own density, people interpret him as stupid, though he’s adept verbally in ways that are incomprehensible to someone like Hillary Clinton or Al Gore, or—evidently—to an audience of the educated. Today’s educated people in our country learned how to talk by studying for the SAT exam, and aspire to the verbal skills and creativity of the machines that grade standardized tests.

But millions of people have no trouble understanding the way Trump communicates, which they find refreshingly frank. It’s not that what Trump says is necessarily true; much of it isn’t. It’s just that his presentation of himself is infinitely more honest than that of, say, Mitt Romney or John Kerry or Joe Scarborough. I thought that the freak-out response had to fade with time, that people couldn’t possibly persist in treating every insulting Tweet aimed at Justin Trudeau or Jeff Sessions as a crisis. But it just goes right on, now including reminders from Charles Blow not to lose your outrage for a moment, because this. is. not. normal. They just have no equipment for dealing with a president who talks like a human being. Of course, not every actual human being talks like Donald Trump; we communicate in many styles. But no actual human being talks like Al Gore.

It’s possible, I’ve realized over the somewhat difficult decades, that what I may regard as a comic monologue, a clever political provocation or a playful bit of verbal transgression, will be regarded by my fellow academics or by members of the Democratic Party as incomprehensible nonsense, a symptom of insanity, or a demonstration that I’m an evil person. And, honestly, I have, in large measure, capitulated. I no longer try to treat a college classroom the way Trump treats a campaign rally. I speak more slowly, because I have to go over and edit each sentence in my head before it emerges. I think this is useless, but I find I have to live in my world somehow.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep voting against Trump and keep delighting in his verbal style and its political success. The automata are getting what they deserve, and it’s going to take something more than a phrase-producing mechanism to beat Trump in 2020, if he makes it that far without being impeached.

You can find this article, by Dr. Crispin Sartwell, here.

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