Civil Rights Suit Against Appointed Minor’s Counsel William Spiller, Jr. Headed to Alternative Dispute Resolution
This case has made it further than most 42 U.S.C. 1983 suits. The civil rights statute was written by the legislature who attempt to be responsive to the will of the People, but judges misinterpret it to exclude the conduct of almost every government actor, especially when the defendant is a judge or other court employee.
Two California state judges, Gus T. May and Michael C. Small were dismissed after the complaint was filed.
The original complaint and the first amended, operative complaint are posted below. They are a great read. Mr. Sobel’s integrity as an officer of the court in pursuit of justice overshadows his one commonplace error. (Yes, attorney Sobel used that awful character chain “and/or”, the use of which I intend to challenge at the Supreme Court if the case of Micheal Pietrczak v. Laura Lynn et al reaches that level.)
I wrote about attorney William Spiller, Jr. more than a decade ago, chronicling his lucrative gig supposedly representing children in family and dependency court. He racked up obscene bills that seemed to require the superhuman ability to work ceaselessly. The bills were paid by taxpayers or the middle class and affluent parents forced to pay under the authority of the courts.
The results of Mr. Spiller’s misrepresentations were devastating.
Supreme Court’s Betrayal of Public Trust by Silence
Supreme Court Declines to Hear Parents’ Case Against Child Protective Services Investigator for Retaliation Against Their Family
Court leaves open the question of whether retaliatory investigations by government officials, even when they lack probable cause, are unconstitutional
J. Justin Wilson · January 10, 2023 (Reposted by permission of Institute for Justice.)
IJ is a public interest law firm. We represent clients free of charge in cutting-edge litigation defending vital constitutional rights. You can join us by supporting our work here: ij.org/support
Yesterday, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear a case against a child protective services (CPS) official who abusively investigated a Missouri family. The result of the Court’s decision will serve to embolden CPS and other government officials nationwide to wield retaliatory investigations against average people as punishment for standing up for their rights.
This case started with a tragic incident involving a sexual assault of a minor boy by a sheriff’s deputy for Scott County, Missouri. The incident happened while the officer was on duty, so the parents (who are going by their initials in this case to maintain their son’s privacy) threatened to take legal action against the sheriff’s department. After all, it was known to the department that the deputy had been disciplined in previous law enforcement jobs. In response, the local child protective services investigator—who has worked with the department—opened a retaliatory investigation into the parents for child neglect. She claimed that the parents were the ones to blame for letting their son be sexually abused.
What followed was a nightmare for the family, involving multiple interviews of the already traumatized boy, a referral to a clinic for an inspection of the boy’s genitals and rectum, and a threat to take away the father’s law-enforcement license. The investigator only backed off from harassing the family after the family found pro bono lawyers to help them defend their rights. These lawyers helped the family appeal the investigator’s findings of child neglect, which were quickly overturned by the review board based on the lack of evidence.
Once the parents cleared their names, they sued the investigator for violating their First Amendment rights. The district court agreed with their claim and denied the investigator her defense of qualified immunity. The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, however, writing that “[e]ven assuming that the facts in the complaint are true,” there is no such thing as retaliatory investigation claims in the Eighth Circuit. In other words, the court gave a blank check to government officials to punish individuals by investigating them.
By refusing to grant the parents’ petition for certiorari, the Supreme Court allowed this decision to stand.
“Government investigations are reputation-damaging, stressful and costly,” said Anya Bidwell, an attorney for the Institute for Justice, which represented the parents in their appeal to the Supreme Court. “No one should be the victim of retaliation through a governmental investigation just because they seek to vindicate their rights. This is government intimidation and abuse of power at its worst. The Court should have taken the parents’ case and made it clear to all government officials that retaliatory investigations are unconstitutional.”
Department of Health and Human Services statistics indicate that CPS case workers investigate the home lives of roughly 3.5 million children every year. And CPS investigations represent just a fraction of governmental investigations launched each year against citizens. “The Institute for Justice is committed to the idea that government officials do not have carte blanche to make citizens’ lives miserable and bully them into silence through investigations,” said Patrick Jaicomo, IJ’s senior attorney and a co-counsel in the case. “Officials can’t be allowed to weaponize their investigative powers. We will not rest until the Supreme Court says so.”
Arkansas Attorneys Received Millions in PPP Funds to Represent the Well to Do
Did you have trouble obtaining a PPP “loan” from the Small Business Administration? These are a couple of the Arkansas law firms that fared better than you:
Rose Law Firm received $1,847,135.
Quattelbaum, Grooms & Tull PLLC received $1,224,000.
Borrowers were eligible for loan forgiveness if they followed these criteria during the set period after disbursement of the funds:
- Employee and compensation levels are maintained,
- The loan proceeds are spent on payroll costs and other eligible expenses, and
- At least 60% of the proceeds are spent on payroll costs.
These firms represent such clients as Portfolio Recovery Associates, LLC, the nation’s second largest debt buyer, First American Home Warranty Company and other big businesses.
We, the taxpayers, subsidized these aggressive firms while average citizens could not afford to protect their own rights during the pandemic.
Notably, Legal Aid of Arkansas, Inc., the law firm that serves those who cannot afford an attorney in a civil matter, received $521,600. That means the 54 employees working for the firm that provides access to justice to the lower and middle economic classes received less than a third of the money that went to Rose Law Firm to serve its billionaire clients.
This data was compiled by the Washington Post who obtained it from the SBA after filing a FOIA request and lawsuit. You can see other companies that received over $150,000 here.
Women’s Coalition Offer Input to United Nations: Find Judges Encourage Patriarchal Power Structure
You can read the submission here. Posted by permission implicit in that all submissions will be included in a public document.
This submission by The Women’s Coalition [hereafter “Coalition”] is in response to the Call for Input by the UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women regarding child custody cases.
Women in countries all over the world are being maltreated in family courts, wrongly deprived of custody, and unable to protect their children. The Special Rapporteur has requested input on many issues surrounding this “custody crisis”, which the Coalition includes in this submission.
However, in the end, it is imperative to put all these issues into the larger context, so the core cause of the crisis becomes clear. It is not just victims of domestic violence who are affected; women are losing custody whether they report abuse or not. Judges often switch custody to fathers who want it, for whatever reason, often to reduce child support or punish their ex for leaving.
This ubiquity supports the core cause of the crisis being systemic male entitlement and the concomitant discrimination against women, rather than the improper handling of women’s reports of violence or abuse. The custody crisis needs to be understood as essentially about power, not abuse—about judges maintaining age-old male entitlement and control in the family, i.e. persisting patriarchy. Only then can an effective solution be identified that gets at the root of the problem. It is the Coalition’s contention that reforms made within the Family Court system will not get to the source of the problem and that a new system is necessary.
SURVEY
The Coalition conducted a last-minute survey after hearing about the Call for Input a few weeks ago. There was no time to translate it into other languages, otherwise there would have been many more participants. Even so, 518 mothers from 21 countries took part: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Portugal, Scotland, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States of America.
This survey represents a convenience sample and is not meant to be representative of all family court cases. The survey provides quantitative insights on cases in which mothers have lost custody or have been unable to protect their children. Tens of thousands more cases have been compiled qualitatively by the Coalition and other civic organizations worldwide, attesting to women’s lived experiences.
DISREGARD OF ABUSE
The Special Rapporteur stated the aim of the investigation is to “document the many ways in which family courts ignore the history and existence of domestic and family violence and abuse in the context of custody cases”. “Ignored” is the operative word, as countless mothers report judges are disregarding strong and credible evidence. 95% of mothers surveyed reported that their judge ignored, dismissed, or minimized evidence of violence, abuse, unfitness, or other negative facts about the father.
Judges often issue gag orders or seal cases to keep injustices concealed and disempower mothers. In some jurisdictions, cases are automatically confidential. This is consistent with the patriarchal narrative that abuse is a “private family matter”. It is not. Abuse of women and children is a societal issue.
MISUSE OF PARENTAL ALIENATION
The Special Rapporteur’s Call for Input states there will be special emphasis on “parental alienation and related concepts”. A dictionary definition and common usage of the term is, “Alienation is when one person causes another person to be indifferent, hostile to, or estranged from someone”.
Thus, alienation exists on a spectrum from indifference to complete estrangement. Although it has not been established as a valid scientific construct, it is indisputable that parents sometimes engage in this behavior and that it is harmful.
The problem with alienation is not that it is unscientific. It is that judges are falsely finding mothers have alienated their children by coaching or influencing them to say their father abused them. But, as our survey demonstrates, judges often use other false accusations to switch custody, the most common being that mothers are lying or mentally ill. Judges also often claim that being with the father is in the child’s best interest, or that it is a father’s right to be with his child, regardless of abuse.
However, there is an arguably much more serious problem with the discussion around parental alienation that does not get much attention: judges are enabling fathers to truly alienate children from their mothers. The main way judges do this is to severely restrict or eliminate children’s contact with the mother, which can cause them to form a trauma bond with their father.
Another way is that judges order children into “reunification therapy”, the problem with that being it is not really therapy children are getting. Judges appoint mental health professionals who will “coercively persuade” (i.e. brainwash) children to recant abuse and comply with living with their father. Judges rarely order reunification with mothers because the goal is to keep the father in control.
Much activism is focused on invalidating and prohibiting the use of parental alienation or reunification therapy in family courts. However, it is neither parental alienation nor reunification therapy that is the problem. The problem is that judges have the power to falsely find mothers to be alienating to justify switching custody and appoint therapists who will help alienate children from mothers.
Prohibiting the use of alienation or reunification therapy, as many organizations and activists are pushing for, will not be effective because, as the survey shows, judges can simply use other terms or something else entirely. So, the Coalition strongly advises the Special Rapporteur not to recommend it be abolished. The Human Rights Council taking that position could do much harm to women who have been truly alienated and to the effort to end the crisis.
Instead, it would be helpful if a statement is made clarifying the real problems with parental alienation and urging women who’ve been falsely accused to unite with women who’ve been truly alienated. Women will have more power fighting together for an effective solution, such as the new system proposed.
COURT-AFFILIATED PROFESSIONALS
Judges regularly appoint children’s legal representatives, custody evaluators, therapists, mediators, and others, on whom they supposedly rely in making their custody decisions. But they inevitably choose professionals who can be counted on to steer cases to the father.
Although there is activism to require stricter regulation, higher qualification, and more training for court officials, that will not significantly change outcomes, since the actions of the appointees are mere reflections of the judges’ wishes. Also, judges can simply ignore them if they don’t say what is expected.
THREATS AND PUNISHMENT
Threats and punishments serve to not only discourage women from continuing their own efforts to protect their children, but also send a message to other women to cease and desist. Judges and other court officials often threaten mothers to get them to comply with orders to make their children visit unsupervised or live with an abusive father, or to stay quiet about abuse.
Judges not only threaten mothers, they actually restrict contact with children to punish them for challenging male authority in the family. Mothers are also being criminally indicted after going into hiding to escape abuse. Law enforcement and the criminal justice system often aid and abet family court judges by prosecuting them.
Thus, contact with children is being used by judges as leverage, not in their best interest.
GRAVE CONSEQUENCES
Many women not only suffer psychologically, but are losing their homes and careers and being financially devastated. Some succumb to suicide.
More than half of the mothers in the survey said they considered running with their children, and 15% fled anyway, many of who were imprisoned. The Hague has failed women who run, ordering them back to return children to the abusive father.
Children almost always suffer from psychological problems and many from educational problems, substance use issues, suicidal ideation, and some children also succumb to suicide. Both mothers and children are being rendered unable to fulfill their human potential.
HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights enumerates certain inalienable rights guaranteed to all citizens. Equal protection under the law is set out in Article 7. The right to a fair hearing before an impartial tribunal is set out in Article 10. The right to be free of torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment is set out in Article 5.
Articles 7 and 10 establish the right to due process and prohibition of sex discrimination. A whopping 98% of mothers surveyed reported their judge discriminated against them. However, it should be noted that this is not simple discrimination due to unconscious bias or gender stereotyping. It is deep, systemic discrimination executed for the purpose of empowering men in their role as fathers.
Of course, there is no way to prove a judge discriminated against or tortured a mother psychologically, but it is important to credit women’s lived experiences in the courtroom. These human rights violations need to be prevented, not remedied. Judges must be prevented from committing them in the first place.
CONCLUSION
The family court system is greatly harming women and children around the world. Women are being deprived of custody and the ability to protect their children, along with being financially devastated.
It should not be surprising that men created a system that perpetuates their power in the family after women gained financial independence and the ability to divorce. In order for women to regain the power they had to keep and protect their children before patriarchy took hold, a new system is needed which provides them due process and equal protection.
The Coalition has attempted to establish in this submission that the issues of interest to the Special Rapporteur are all means or results of judges making rulings that maintain male power and control in the family. The reason Family Court judges are able to entitle fathers and oppress mothers is because they have, in effect, absolute power, and there is no effective means of oversight or remedy. Besides, unjust rulings need to be prevented, not remedied, as children suffer greatly in the litigation process.
Because of this, reforms within the present system will not make any significant difference. Custody cases must not be heard in family courts.
The Coalition has drafted legislation in which custody cases are removed from family courts and heard in regular, public civil courts with the right to a jury. This will provide for due process and equal protection, while precluding judges from inflicting torturous and degrading treatment on litigants, thus preventing the human rights violations being committed in family courts. The Coalition is willing to work with the Special Rapporteur or others within the Human Rights Council or other UN body to create a framework to be used internationally.
REQUESTS
The Coalition hereby requests the Special Rapporteur make three recommendations in her report to the Human Rights Council:
· First, that the Council should identify the human rights violations identified by the Special Rapporteur are a result of “systemic male entitlement and the concomitant discrimination against women”.
· Second, that the Council should establish that reforms within the present system will not prevent judges from committing human rights violations, hence, the right to a jury trial in a regular civil court must be guaranteed, along with other due process protections.
· Third, that the Council should form a task group that communicates with The Women’s Coalition and other women’s rights organizations to create an international framework for a process that will provide justice and protection in custody cases, and where the Coalition’s proposed Child Custody Act may act as a guide in this process.
Finally, it is The Women’s Coalition’s earnest stance that this approach is the only way women’s human and civil rights will be effectively upheld in custody cases. Non-abusive men who truly want the best for their children will also benefit from this new and just process.
Respectfully submitted to the UN Special Rapporteur this 15th day of December 2022
Cindy Dumas
Founder and Executive Director of The Women’s Coalition
Courts Using Conservatorships to Rob from the Elderly
Thank you to a California Grand Jury for this report about how civil rights are violated against our second most vulnerable community. (If you think the unborn are not human, then you might consider the elderly and feeble minded as the most vulnerable community.)
Court mandated conservatorship is often a euphemism for embezzlement and elder abuse.
I am only 60 years old, but an Arkansas attorney, William Zac White, tried to have me declared incompetent. Even though he appears to get everything he asks for from Judge Susan Weaver and several other judges, I was able to stop him from his plan to transfer control of my assets and my freedom to a conservator. Otherwise, he would undoubtedly nominate himself as conservator and I would live out my days in captivity without freedom to spend time with my husband and offspring.
Please read the report and pray for our elderly who have their homes stolen and are committed to live in an “assisted living” home.
Open Letter Looking for My Soul Mate
A wonderful writer named Shelly Hart wrote an article in CityWatchLA.com describing the corruption against and disdain for pro se litigants by judges perfectly.
I reached out to Ms. Hart through her online news group and hope to publish her work here as a guest author soon.
Here is a copy of the email:
Hi. My name is Laura Lynn Hammett. I was Laura Lynn until 2019.
You may be familiar with the work I did to get the CJP to give a “severe” public admonishment to retired commissioner Alan Friedenthal (deceased).
One of my colleagues forwarded a copy of an article written by Shelly Hart published September 23, 2019.
Bravo!
Arkansas is my new home. Unfortunately, the judiciary here is as bad as in California. It is more frustrating as many of the judges pose as “Christians”, even proclaiming “praise Jesus” on public posts. My response is a little different than when Jesus turned the tables over at the temple. The hypocrisy makes me want to puke.
Please forward this email to Ms. Hart as an introduction. Also, can you give me permission to reprint the article on my blog?
Foreshadowing Doom in the Arkansas Court of Appeals
Just the facts. I don’t want to speculate as to motivation. It is just too depressing to think the Justices at the Arkansas Court of Appeals are as conniving and disingenuous as Circuit Court Judge Susan Kaye Weaver and District Court Judge Charles Clawson.
Susan Weaver used her position of power to transfer my assets that were held in trust to a man who put in writing his intent to defraud me of over $75,000 by convincing me I was paying off the “mortgage” then foreclosing on the property after I gave him “cash”.
I was dismissed from the suit as an individual, but “the trust” was found in default. Judge Weaver said that I could not speak on behalf of the trust.
The reason courts give for forbidding an individual from representing himself as trustee of a trust is that the trustee is a fiduciary to beneficiaries and the settlor of the trust. A person must be authorized to practice law to represent anyone else’s interests.
I was settlor, trustee and sole beneficiary of my trust. My sons were contingent beneficiaries, meaning if I did not terminate the trust before I died, they would become beneficiaries later, at my death.
To be certain that I can represent myself in all my trust capacities, I amended the trust to remove my sons. The purpose of the trust was to transfer property to my sons without paying the high taxes at probate. The government takes about four times as much of an estate that was not transferred through a trust. But Judge Susan Weaver and her friendlies already looted my trust. There was nothing left to give to my sons anyhow.
Now, I am not an attorney. I am inexperienced compared to most attorneys. I made a mistake.
When I filed a notice of appearance with a copy of the amended trust, I came into a glich in the electronic filing system. It would only let someone with a bar number file the entry of appearance. So I used the “motion – other” document type.
Instead of telling me I used the wrong document type, the Court proceeded as if my entry of appearance was a motion. It did not look like a motion. It did not smell like a motion.
But the Justices of the Arkansas Court of Appeal pretended it was a motion and denied my Constitutional right to represent myself, in all my different hats.
Then, the images of the entry of appearance were not posted on the online docket. That alone makes me suspect that the Justices were trying to hide something. But I promised not to speculate. [UPDATE] The Clerk added the images and apologized. She said that the error was made because my case is marked “Under Seal” because 10 pages are supposed to be under seal.
Here are copies of the entry of judgment, the amended trust and my motion filed today that explains the facts recited above to the COA and asks them to strike their “Formal Order” denying my right to self-representation without giving a reason.
Trauma Bonding or the Systemic Destruction of Justice
You may not love me. You may even despise me. But you are drawn to read my work.
In the past, I wrote about corruption in the family law courts.
Children were torn from their mothers under the guise of “best interests”. The actual face of “Justice” was a macabre blend of greed and misogyny.
Women, mostly battered and abused, often exploited, bonded together to fight the injustices. We had faces of every shade of peach, tan and brown. We were poor and we were financially blessed. We were those with pedigreed voices lending our words to protect our underserved and ignored sisters.
Beautiful friendships flourished, watered by the tears of our children.
The end of our individual tales was often tragic, at best bittersweet.
Our common epilogue brings a glimmer of hope. The United Nations Human Rights High Commissioner has issued a call for input. They want to hear our stories about the all too prevalent practice of wayward lawyers, judges and the minion court collaterals who gave full custody of children to their abusive fathers.
(Victimized mothers, children and the therapists and social justice organizations who care can learn how to submit their testimony by January 15, 2022, here,)
Many of our friendships have floundered or failed. We once shared a “trauma bond”. We have moved on by breaking free of the chains that held us together.
A few found justice delayed, an oxymoron, and wanted to spend the rest of their precious time with their juvenile children in the peace of anonymity.
One mother, who asked for anonymity, was reunited with her children, only to have one torn from her again by the tragedy of an alcohol related death.
One courageous crusader, Janette Isaacs, was ripped away from us too soon and is surely now in heaven. Perhaps she is sharing eternal laughter with Super-Lawyer Bob Canny and Fox News Producer Martin Burns. (I have a fond memory of Janette serving a summons on court collateral Michael Howard by wrapping it in a box with Christmas paper and a balloon bouquet attached and having him happily accept the “gift”.)
I moved to Arkansas and was content to spend the rest of my years uncovering the talents and teaching my now adult children to fly.
Unfortunately, for me and for them, some dishonest judges and lawyers chose to poke the sleeping “bear”.
(Back in California, the Los Angeles County Sheriff sent two officers, one plain clothed man and a uniformed woman, to accost me on my way into a child custody and support hearing. The detective accused me of writing threatening posts on the internet. In reply to my query for an example, he said that I wrote “coming between a mother and her child is like coming between a mother bear and her cub.” The female officer blurted out, “that is not threatening!” The look in her superior’s eyes certainly was. The kicker is that I was not the author of that particular post. The woman who wrote it mentioned her new husband, and I was unmarried at the time. Not even “married in the eyes of God”.)
Too many of those privileged to attend law school abuse their talent of linguistic intelligence to pervert justice.
For example, Judge Lee P. Rudofsky omitted a dependent clause that followed the independent clause of a complex sentence, to dramatically change the meaning of the sentence, and used the absurd result to deny justice to a victim of annoying phone calls made with no proper rationale.
And lawyer William Zac White used the character chain “and/or” to make a complaint indefinite. When “and” didn’t work, his apparent cohort, Judge Susan Weaver, treated the non-word as “or” to rationalize transferring assets from a trust to admitted fraudsters.
Several simple legal matters turned into “federal cases” and ammunition to counterattack those who would destroy our system of justice, not with bear claws or bullets, but with words.
We, my present readers and I, may not be bonded by love. Our meetings will not be vigils for lives destroyed. We lack the trauma bond.
Hopefully we can find mutual respect and a common cause.
As my anonymous muse wrote: “Language excites us and when used to advance our cause of fighting systemic injustice…nothing could be finer.”
A Higher Law 