San Francisco has more than 1,100 cases past statutory time limits, and 115 of those defendants are languishing in jail without a conviction.

At a rally on the steps of the Hall of Justice last week, concerned residents and staffers with the Public Defender’s Office gathered to denounce what they view as San Francisco Superior Court’s routine breach of criminal defendants’ constitutional rights.

San Francisco resident Christine Sipra said during the protest that when she saw media reports about defendants sitting in jail for years awaiting trial, she was compelled to join the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office rally.

“Who’s being affected? Our community members, our neighbors — and it does not escape me that any one of us can be affected by this,” Sipra said. “This could be our friends, our families. This could be something that might affect me in my life dramatically. People are losing their homes, their jobs, pets — all kinds of circumstances are being affected by people that are being held without the basic human right of a speedy trial.”

In September 2021, San Francisco Public Defender Mano Raju and four others — including two mothers of adult children whose speedy trial rights were violated — filed a taxpayers’ lawsuit to compel San Francisco Superior Court to address the backlog, which began when COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders suspended court proceedings in March 2020.

They demanded that the court abide by California statutes requiring that priority be given to criminal trials over civil cases, and to cases where the accused is incarcerated pre-trial. It also stipulated that the court follow procedural steps before extending criminal trials beyond time limits.

Raju’s lawsuit went to Contra Costa County Superior Court, and in December 2021, Judge Edward Weil ruled that his court did not have the authority to compel the San Francisco court to act. He said relief must be sought in the Court of Appeal instead. 

Raju filed a notice of appeal with the California Court of Appeal in March 2022 and filed his opening brief in July that year. In January 2023, San Francisco Superior Court filed a response and oral arguments were heard in April. On June 8, the First District Court of Appeal reinstated the suit and ruled that Raju and his fellow petitioners can seek court orders to reserve more courtrooms for criminal trials.

This week, San Francisco Superior Court filed a petition for review from the California Supreme Court arguing that permitting lawsuits that challenge court administration would have “profound” adverse consequences.

“The final destination of the Court of Appeal’s ruling is chaos,” states the court’s petition. “If the presiding judge and the judge assigned to the taxpayer action gave conflicting orders about opening courtrooms, security, and staffing, nobody would know which orders to follow.”

The petition stated that the First District Court of Appeal was wrong when it claimed that the civil code authorizes taxpayers’ lawsuits against state officials.

“It does not,” states the court’s petition. “The statute authorizes actions against officers or agents of a ‘local agency.’ A ‘local agency’ is ‘a city, town, county, or city and county, or a district, public authority, or any other political subdivision in the state.’”

The court’s petition argued that the case Taking Offense v. State of California, which is making its way through the courts, will determine whether California recognizes taxpayer standing to bring actions against state officials, and that ruling could eliminate or significantly change the basis and requirements for this lawsuit.

Deputy Public Defender Sujung Kim said Aug. 4 that the California Supreme Court has sanctioned multiple cases in the last 50 years that allowed taxpayers to bring lawsuits against state officials.

She added that disallowing taxpayer lawsuits against state officials would lead to unchecked powers for the court.

“If we buy into what the court is saying, that means that courts are above the law, that their actions cannot be scrutinized even if they’re violating state law or doing something that’s illegal,” Kim said. “It goes against public policy to say that courts are above the law.”

The Public Defender’s Office intends to file a response Monday to the Superior Court’s petition for review to the State Supreme Court.

At the rally on the steps of the Hall of Justice on July 28, Raju said the court is starting to catch up on felony case backlogs, but misdemeanor cases remain postponed while civil cases take priority.

“Last week, there was only one misdemeanor trial courtroom open,” Raju said. “These cases are causing huge distractions in people’s lives, their work and their home lives, taking off work for court hearings, dealing with electronic monitoring that’s limiting people’s movements and their ability to support themselves with no trial or resolution in sight.”

Last week’s rally was the public defender staff’s eighth and final weekly summer sit-in protesting long delays in criminal trials. It was the latest action in a years-long campaign to bring awareness to the trial backlog.

In a rally last September, defendants like Robert Brewer, 31, talked about the profound impact trial delays had on their lives. Brewer said he used to be a social butterfly, but since being release from a 288-day incarceration awaiting trial in San Francisco County Jail, he’s a changed man.

“There’s just a black cloud hanging over me,” Brewer said. “You’re treated like you’re guilty until you’re proven innocent. I lost my brother — my best friend. I wasn’t able to walk him out of this world.”

Right to a speedy trial

Receiving a speedy trial is a fundamental right guaranteed by both the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution and the California Constitution. According to federal and state law, if a defendant isn’t brought to trial within 60 days of arraignment for a felony or 30 days of arraignment for a misdemeanor, the case would be dismissed.  

Long case delays can lead to undue anxiety for defendants, oppressive pretrial incarceration, faded memories among witnesses and the potential for lost evidence.

Certain time limit concessions are allowed, however. To keep a defendant in jail past mandatory limits, four legal requirements must be met: 1) there is enough evidence for a guilty verdict; 2) the defendant would harm others if released; 3) less restrictive measures are not an option; 4) and the judge must explain the decision for the record.

There are legal exceptions called “good cause,” which could include a defendant’s request to extend the trial, a defendant failing to appear for a hearing, a defendant having no legal representation at trial, the defendant becoming incapacitated and unable to defend themselves, or the case being too complex to process within time limits, for example in the case of multiple defendants.

The law allows for discretion over statutory time limits under “exceptional circumstances,” including matters of public health. In March 2020, COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders led Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, chairperson of the Judicial Council of California, to shut down courts and extend the time limits on jury trials by 90 days.

The San Francisco Superior Court reopened all courtrooms on June 18, 2021. The Chief Justice’s orders were rescinded on June 30, 2022.

In December 2021, San Francisco Supervisor Hillary Ronen called a hearing on the case pileup. Afterward, two civil courtrooms were opened for out-of-custody criminal trials. But the backlog only increased.

The lawsuit filed by Raju in September 2021 states that pre-pandemic, the court would hold up to 150 misdemeanor trials annually, but since misdemeanor trials resumed in 2021, the court is averaging only 15 misdemeanor trials per year.

Earlier this year, the Public Defender’s Office filed Estrada v. Superior Court seeking to dismiss a criminal case for violating speedy trial rights. The lawsuit argued that the courts abused their discretion in claiming exceptional circumstances in violation of a defendant’s speedy trial rights. They argued that delays are not due to the pandemic, but rather to chronic court mismanagement, including unused courtrooms, excessive judicial vacations and failure to hold trials at the Civic Center courthouse.

In March 2023, the Court of Appeal supported the court. The appeals decision said the backlog resulted from court closures and later disruptions from COVID-19 case surges and new variants, and that the backlog could not reasonably be expected to dissipate within months or even a year or two, particularly given that new criminal cases keep being filed.

The San Francisco Superior Court referred to this decision in its filing with the State Supreme Court to argue that “a criminal defendant’s speedy-trial rights do not impose mandatory duties on courts to allocate resources, open courtrooms, hire staff, or upgrade security.”

Some civil rights groups have requested that the Estrada v. Superior Court decision be unpublished to avoid setting a dangerous precedent undermining the right to a speedy trial. In a written appeal, an organization based in Washington, D.C. called the Civil Rights Corps argued that weakening the right to a speedy trial makes “the plea bargain system impermissibly coercive, increasing prosecutors’ leverage in plea negotiations against people, both jailed and free, who await trial indefinitely. Deprived of their lone bargaining chip, the right to reject the offer and demand a speedy trial, the accused will end up begging rather than negotiating.”

The backlog

It is unclear how many criminal cases were left unresolved in San Francisco Superior Court last year. The court provided data for the California Judicial Council’s 2023 court statistics report stating that 35,265 criminal cases were filed — 3,086 felonies, 2,179 misdemeanors, and the rest mainly traffic-related infractions. It showed that civil filings totaled 12,004 cases with 10,433 resolved. But San Francisco was one of 10 counties that did not disclose the outcomes of criminal cases.

San Francisco also failed to provide its criminal case processing time. The 48 counties that did report their data showed that an average of 45% of felony cases and 43% of misdemeanors cases were resolved in less than 90 days.

Several Bay Area counties made accommodations to whittle down their trial backlog. Contra Costa County cut its trial backlog in half by March 2022. And other counties used alternative venues for pretrial proceedings like jury assembly, including the San Mateo County Event Center and the Sonoma County Event Center at the Fairgrounds. That freed up county courtrooms for trials. San Francisco has made no such effort.

Courts outside the Bay Area also found ways to deal with unwieldy backlogs. Riverside County contended with its roughly 2,800 backlogged cases by bringing civil judges onto criminal trials.

San Francisco has 57 judicial officers — judges and others with the power to facilitate, arbitrate, preside over and make decisions on cases — for a population of 815,201. That’s just under seven judicial officers per 100,000 residents compared with a statewide average of 11.4 per 100,000 residents. Yet additional judges have not been brought in to help alleviate the workload, according to the public defender’s office — for example, by temporarily bringing civil judges onto criminal trials as was done in Riverside County.

According to Raju, the judges’ explanations for the backlog have recently shifted.

“Judges in the building are no longer reading a canned script that blames COVID for delays. And felony trials are moving forward faster by all indications,” Raju said. “But I’m also here to say that this situation is by no means over, and our work is not done.”

Meanwhile, the judges who are presiding over cases are taking vacations, but the courts aren’t finding substitutes to handle some of the caseload while they’re away — and that’s taking a huge toll, according to an analysis by Deputy Public Defender Oliver Kroll.

Kroll filed a petition in Estrada v. Superior Court. His analysis of the court’s vacancies during the COVID-19 pandemic showed that between July 2021 and May 2022, courtrooms were empty 56% of the time. And from April to August 2022, 59% of the vacancies were due to judges’ vacations.

During a protest in front of the Civic Center courthouse on July 21, Deputy Public Defender Sujung Kim said people have a right to take vacations but, “the court has an obligation to find coverage for these judges when they’re on vacation.”

“A government agency like the court serves the people, that is their job, they’re public servants. And so, they have a duty to make sure that the courts are fully staffed and they’re not doing it,” Kim said.

In March 2022, the court gave an explanation for why trials were being delayed in response to Hernandez-Valenzuela v. Superior Court, which sought a dismissal for a criminal case for violating speedy trial rights.

The court stated that delays were happening because the San Francisco Sheriff’s Office was overextended at the jails and the Hall of Justice, that security at the Civic Center courthouse was inadequate for criminal trials other than nonviolent misdemeanors, and there were not enough bailiffs to cover each courtroom.

In an emailed response, the Sheriff’s Office stated that the court is using two courtrooms at the Civic Center courthouse and “is going to be using” the Criminal Justice Center for out-of-custody felony trials.

“These two locations lack some of the security features that make the Hall of Justice a safer place for those trials,” the email stated. “The Sheriff’s Office, as always, is collaborating with the Court to address security concerns related to the change of use of the Criminal Justice Center and the increased number of criminal cases being assigned in the Civic Center Court.”

Kim said she is dubious that security concerns were the main issue because the Civic Center Courthouse was used for felony trials for many years.

“When they ran out of space at the Hall of Justice, there were too many cases, they had to open up some of these courtrooms,” Kim said in an interview. “They tried murder cases, sexual, all kinds of cases. But now, the courts excuse for why they can’t try criminal cases here at this courthouse is because of, quote unquote, security reasons. We have probed and asked, and they have never given us any more details about what exactly the security concerns are. We’re very skeptical that that is the true reason.”

Kroll said in an interview that justice is being denied because the absence of trial deadlines without clear reasons gives the district attorney’s office no motivation to settle a case. And a defendant’s desperation may compel them to agree to a prosecutor’s terms regardless of guilt or innocence.

“Coercive plea bargaining is the leading cause of wrongful conviction,” Kroll said. “And then the conviction haunts you for the rest of your life, like a scarlet letter.”

During a protest in front of the Civic Center courthouse, Deputy Public Defender Zach Waterman from the Misdemeanor Unit explained why defendants in misdemeanor cases are especially vulnerable to wrongful convictions.

“Evidence in misdemeanors — there’s none of that. Not until you get to a trial,” Waterman said. “In a felony, you have a preliminary hearing, they have to put officers on the stand, they’ll tell you what happened, and you get to cross examine them. In a misdemeanor, there is no hearing. You’re presumed guilty. That’s what this court does every single day, in every single case, until you fight all the way to the moment of your trial.”

The harm

Kroll’s petition in Estrada v. Superior Court includes several declarations by defendants who described their ordeal:

“Alexandra Andrews, who is detained pretrial in County Jail 2 in San Francisco, writes that she was subjected to weeks-long lockdowns where she was not allowed out of her cell at all. She has not been able to contact her family because she was not given a working phone pin number. She writes: ‘It feels like my mental stability is continuing to degrade . . . I feel like I’m dealing with everything on my own.’”

Another declaration states:

“Felipe Preciado, who is detained pretrial in County Jail 3 in San Bruno, writes that he is often confined in a small, dirty, poorly ventilated cell with another inmate for the entire day, without even time out of the cell to shower. He writes: ‘Being here has completely changed me . . . I’m filled with despair.’”

Despite the conditions in county jail, the stress of looming trials can lead defendants to choose jail hoping for a faster resolution that would free them from strict restrictions, according to the public defender’s office.

Charles Underwood, who is unhoused and legally blind, was charged with misdemeanor assault and battery and requested pretrial jail hoping to expedite his case. Nevertheless, his case was delayed four months. In June, a jury acquitted him after two hours of deliberation.

Brewer, who spent 288 in jail before his trial, was also found not guilty by a San Francisco Superior Court jury. He had been charged with murder for the Aug. 19, 2020 shooting in the Tenderloin of 44-year-old Contra Costa County resident Darrelle Scales. Brewer said he shot Scales in self-defense after approaching Scales’ car, believing it to be his own rental car. A dispute ensued and Brewer walked away, but Scales followed while reaching for a shiny object in his waistband. Brewer retaliated by shooting. The object turned out to be a metal pipe.

Sarina Borg, 45, was also acquitted after more than two years in jail. During the September 2022 public defender rally, her mother, Myra Borg, talked about the impact of her daughter’s years-long incarceration without a conviction.

“As a result of the horrible conditions in jail and being misdiagnosed for nearly two years, my daughter is now ill with a very serious condition that has resulted in her lungs collapsing and is spreading to other organs in her body,” Borg said. “Her doctors at San Francisco General prescribed medicine and treatment, but when she returns to jail, it takes weeks for her to receive her prescribed medication and treatment.

“I keep praying that this nightmare will end, and my daughter will come home to me and her children so we can begin to heal together.”

It would take yet another 2 months for her daughter to be released. In May 2020, Sarina Borg was accused of aiding and abetting a February 2020 homicide. Her case finally went to trial in October 2022, and in early November, a judge decided there wasn’t enough evidence to show that Borg knew about the alleged murderer’s intentions. The judge granted a motion for acquittal before the case could go to the jury. 

The situation in San Francisco County jails is only expected to get worse as city, county and state law enforcement agencies increase the rate of arrests following their May announcement of a new measure to crack down on drug dealers and unhoused people appearing intoxicated on city streets. By July 23, those agencies had logged 502 arrests collectively for drug sales in San Francisco, compared with 566 such arrests in all of 2022.

That’s what brought Dara Dadachanji, a software engineer who lives in the Tenderloin, to the July 21 public defender’s protest at the Civic Center courthouse. He said he’s rattled by what he views as unfair treatment of people experiencing homelessness in his neighborhood.

“People are just waiting in jail for loitering and doing a lot of things where, like, 90% of these cases are gonna get dismissed,” Dadachanji said. “The situation is really bad and a lot of the reason it’s bad is because we sweep people from other areas of the city into the Tenderloin and they’re treating it as a containment zone. But we need to house these people, we need to give them housing, shelter, food and access to resources to get back on their feet. We can’t just arrest them and hope that that’s going to make things go away.”

Both the police crackdown and the trial backlog are taking a disproportionately hard toll on the city’s minority communities. The Sheriff’s Office told the San Francisco Chronicle that of the 58 people arrested for breaking public intoxication or drug possession laws in the first week of the program, 25 were Latinos, 23 white, nine Black and one American Indian. And while about 5.6% of San Francisco residents are Black, more than half the people in San Francisco’s jails whose speedy trial deadlines have passed are Black, according to Raju.

Deputy Public Defender Jacque Wilson said during last Friday’s rally that he felt the injustice personally because he had two brothers who were in prison during the pandemic.

“There’s nothing like trying to hug on a loved one from a jail cell,” Wilson said. “Somewhere, I read that the greatness of America was about the right to a speedy jury trial. Somewhere I read about the greatness of America was the right to go to trial, and the presumption of innocence. All of that is being ignored here in San Francisco.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Deputy Public Defender Jacque Wilson had two brothers in San Francisco County Jail. In fact, they were in prison during the coronavirus pandemic. An earlier version of this story reported that a public defender rally occurred in September 2021. It occurred in September 2022.

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It has been seven months since Maya Laing and her brother Sebastian, who were 15 and 11 at the time, were violently taken from their grandmother’s Santa Cruz home by court order.

Judge Rebecca Connelly, who oversaw their custody case, rejected the siblings’ claims that their mother abused them, and last October she ordered them into reunification training to repair their fractured relationship with their mother.

A friend of Maya’s recorded and posted to social media a video of the siblings resisting while transport agents from Assisted Intervention physically overpowered them in October. That was the last time Maya and Sebastian’s father, his family and the children’s friends had any knowledge of their condition — until now.

On May 29, the siblings posted a series of videos to social media announcing that they had “escaped” their mother’s custody and describing what they endured during their transport and their four-day reunification training.

They said they were taken to an Airbnb where their mother awaited them along with reunification trainers Regina Marshall and Lynn Steinberg. They said they were placed in a room where doorknobs had been removed and where a mattress was pushed against the doorway to keep the door shut. They were guarded by the same transport agents who had overpowered them in Santa Cruz. At one point, the siblings said, one of the agents slept in a bed next to the one they shared. When they were caught exchanging whispered words of comfort, they were banned from speaking to each other.

They said that Steinberg told them that she would “break” them.

“They called us liars and psychopath,” Maya said in one video.

“They, like, threatened to send us to a camp, like a wilderness camp, where if we wouldn’t comply, we wouldn’t be given food or blankets,” Sebastian said.

In response to a written request for comment, Maya wrote that she and her brother viewed their transporters as “kidnappers that we were forced to placate.”

Maya also refuted an allegation by Steinberg that her father was involved in gathering the crowd that arrived to witness their removal from their grandmother’s home. “Our dad in no way orchestrated our protest to being taken. We did what was the only reasonable response to three aggressive strangers, backed up by police officers, coming after us and trying to drag us into a strange car in the middle of the night.”

Maya and Sebastian’s mother, Jessica Laing, responded to a request for comment by emailing a link to a National Center for Missing and Exploited Children webpage featuring two missing child posters of Maya and Sebastian.

Steinberg and Assisted Intervention did not respond to a recent request for comment for this article. In response to a request sent in January, Assisted Intervention sent a brief email stating, “Circumstances like this one are complex.”  

In the meantime, local supporters who spoke out at public events and on social media in reaction to Maya and Sebastian’s removal have gained ground. One month after Maya and Sebastian were taken, Santa Cruz lawmakers held a press conference outside their grandmother’s home to announce local legislation that would ban transport agents from getting physical with children. And as Viji Sundaram recently reported for the Public Press, Senate Bill 331, also called Piqui’s Law: Keeping Children Safe from Family Violence, was unanimously endorsed by California’s Senate Judiciary Committee last month. If the bill is approved by both houses of the Legislature and signed by the governor, it would establish judicial reporting requirements on reunification training and on expert testimony in child custody proceedings.

Several states are considering similar bills to comply with a provision in the federal Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2022. The act promises states up to $25 million in grants if their reforms comply with national requirements.

If you or anyone you know is suffering from domestic abuse, help is available. The National Domestic Violence Hotline provides confidential assistance to anyone affected by domestic violence through a live chat and a free 24-hour hotline at 800-799-7233. The California Partnership to End Domestic Violence offers an online tool for finding local organizations and community resources by region.

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“People are fed up with it,” said San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott at a news conference on Friday. “We are fed up with it. And our attention needs to be on the people who are causing the problems, not on each other.”

But the emphasis on law enforcement for addressing the city’s drug crisis has distressed public defense attorneys and harm reduction advocates who fear the move may worsen the rate of fatal overdoses.

“Right now, we’re losing four people a day to overdose deaths on the street, and that’s up from two a day from last year,” said Sujung Kim, an attorney at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office. “Driving everything underground is part of what makes it so unsafe.”

Kim said she would love to see fewer people addicted to drugs, but cracking down on street level dealing will only worsen fatalities because people will be less likely to call 911 for fear of arrest, and it will drive drug users to buy from unfamiliar sources, heightening the risk of overdose.

Research has shown that incarceration increases risk of overdose. According to a study by the Oregon Health & Science University, Oregon State University and the Oregon Department of Corrections that was published last month in the Journal of Substance Use and Addiction Treatment, people recently released from incarceration face a risk of opioid overdose 10 times greater than the general public.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement on April 21 that he was sending the National Guard and Highway Patrol to San Francisco stated that the new law enforcement partnership would not target drug users, only drug dealers and traffickers.

Scott reiterated that the operation would target drug dealers. But he suggested that police would also focus on open drug use, saying, “It’s not OK — not only to deal drugs on the streets, but to use drugs on the streets.”

Matthew Beevers, deputy adjutant general of the California National Guard, said at Friday’s news conference that he wanted to “dispel rumors” that the military’s involvement would include “boots on the ground in San Francisco.” Instead, he said, the soldiers and airmen would synthesize information gathered by all enforcement agencies into “actionable information that we can map.”

They would track “cartel networks both operating in the city and outside the city — understand those networks, build a common operating picture of it, and then work to dismantle those networks,” Beevers said.

Gary McCoy, vice president of policy and public affairs for HealthRight 360, which is contracted to run numerous harm reduction programs in the city, said he understood the pressure facing city officials and law enforcement, but believed it to be the wrong approach.

“I think that folks are just very frustrated with where we’re at right now, with what they’re seeing that’s more visible in the streets,” McCoy said. “But really, the challenges that we’re seeing on the streets right now are largely due to the war on drugs, and it’s been the punitive approaches to people who use drugs and the high rates of incarceration.”

McCoy advocates reducing drug demand by stepping up access to long-term treatment, and by taking a more forgiving approach to recovery, in which individuals are not kicked out of residential treatment facilities for briefly returning to drug use. He added that 90-day residential treatment programs were not enough to get people with substance use disorder stabilized. Although a new two-year “step-down” facility just opened on Treasure Island offering 70 spots, a lot more is needed, he said.

“The ideal number of step-down beds would be three to four times the amount of residential treatment beds, because you’re cycling more people out of residential treatment,” he said. “We’re getting there. The city’s made fast improvements to that stock.”

There are currently a total of 245 residential treatment beds in San Francisco and 193 step-down beds.

Studying Divergent Approaches

Alex Kral is an epidemiologist with independent research institute RTI International who has been studying harm reduction programs for more than 30 years. Kral said he was baffled by the law enforcement approach because no research has shown that expending resources and efforts on reducing drug supply has led to either reduced demand or reduced health complications related to drug use. Since the adoption of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, he said, resources dedicated to drug supply law enforcement have “far outspent” measures to prevent drug addiction, provide treatment and reduce harm. Meanwhile, “We’ve just seen things get worse and worse and worse.”

“I get it,” Kral said. “If you don’t understand much about drug use or drug markets or any of that, it makes sense to me that people are like ‘Well, if we just prevent there being drugs in the community, it will stop.’ But this is not how it’s ever worked in any society in the world. And definitely the U.S. is a prime example of a place where this has turned out miserably for 50 years.”

In 2008, the Brookings Institution analyzed three approaches to global counternarcotics policies: “the punishment model” of the U.S., which uses incarceration to deter use; “the depenalization model” used in Italy and Spain, which keeps illicit drugs illegal but does not punish personal use below certain amounts; and “the decriminalization model” used in the Netherlands. Findings were most critical of the punishment model of the U.S., where incarceration rates have soared — to more than 350,000 in 2023 from fewer than 50,000 people in 1980 — costing billions in taxes while few prisoners have access to any form of drug treatment.

Drug courts, which were meant to divert defendants into treatment, largely failed at providing treatment to those who truly needed it, and filled up limited spaces with court-mandated patients who did not always need the care, according to research by Physicians for Human Rights.

Mayor London Breed said at Friday’s news conference that the operation in San Francisco differs from the war on drugs of the 1980s, because back then, “everything was about arrest, lock people up.” Now, she said, the city provides “extremely generous” social services.

Nevertheless, the Public Defender’s Office has seen increased prosecutions for low-level drug sales, which are “filling up our jails,” Kim said. And defendants are often subsistence drug dealers, meaning they sell drugs to fund their own addictions.

District Attorney’s Aggressive Tactics

Andi Gernaey is harm reduction director of the St. James Infirmary. Gernaey leads a team that travels by van to the Mission District to distribute hygiene kits, harm reduction supplies, food and other necessities.

Gernaey said the crackdown is in keeping with “draconian” measures from law enforcement that have been seen since Brooke Jenkins took over as San Francisco’s district attorney, including installing barriers along certain streets in the Mission to disrupt sex work.

“A lot of time they just use it as an excuse to harass people and search people and detain people, and then they end up not filing formal charges because they’re more like nuisance charges than what holds up in court,” Gernaey said.

Not knowing what’s planned for the stepped-up enforcement is causing anxiety among the team members, who worry that officers will not understand what they are doing there. Gernaey said they advised the team to be wary.

“If we are approached by police or military,” Gernaey told the workers, “just like, don’t say anything, say you’ll get your supervisor, and then I’ll talk with them because we’re allowed to do what we’re doing.”

Sean Duryee, commissioner of the California Highway Patrol, said at Friday’s conference that his officers would be patrolling and executing arrests. He did not disclose the number of officers involved in the operation but said that 75 officers are currently assigned to San Francisco with nine more arriving in June.

Jenkins said the operation would help combat the “human trafficking defense.” She said suspects often speciously claim to have been forced into selling drugs under threats to them or their families.

“I am very excited at the prospect of having additional resources to be able to dispel the notion that people are not here dealing drugs of their own accord, because that is clearly what is happening,” Jenkins said.

Kim said that as an attorney at the Public Defender’s Office, she had heard “horrific” firsthand accounts from people arrested for dealing drugs, some as young as 17, who had witnessed gang violence in Central America and knew what MS-13 was capable of.

“Brooke Jenkins could deny all she wants, but two of her attorneys lost cases last year where the juries heard their stories,” Kim said. “One of them, they had to pay coyotes to come over here to escape violence, and they were under threat of death, forced to sell drugs. And the juries believed the defense. I’m not saying it’s every single case, but it happens more often than people might know.”

This article is part of a series on San Francisco’s overdose crisis and prevention efforts, underwritten by a California Health Equity Fellowship grant from the Annenberg Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California.

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Introduced by state Sen. Susan Rubio, D-Baldwin Park, the bill — Piqui’s Law: Keeping Children Safe from Family Violence — “gives voice to the 920 children that are calling out to us from their graves,” the lawmaker said in introductory remarks before the committee. One way the state could do that, she said, would be to better train court staff and judges.

The bill is named after Piqui, a 5-year-old boy murdered by his father, who suffocated his son while he was sleeping in his car seat in 2017 during an unsupervised visit.

Piqui’s mother, Ana Estevez, gave tearful testimony, saying her son would not have died had the judge approved her request for sole custody and issued a restraining order against her abusive ex-husband.

Piqui’s Law would direct the Judicial Council of California — the policy-making body of the California courts responsible for ensuring the impartial administration of justice — to expand training for judges on domestic violence and child abuse as part of continuing education requirements.

If approved by both houses of the Legislature and signed by the governor, Senate Bill 331 would establish judicial reporting requirements on these trainings and expert testimony in child custody proceedings.

“One thing is clear,” Rubio said. “We need to educate” the judiciary on domestic violence issues.

Another controversial provision in the bill would prohibit courts from ordering family reunification therapy for children of estranged parents. Judges sometimes forcibly send children to camps that often last no more than four days and cost $25,000 to $40,000, to persuade them to bond with the parent they say abused them. Frequently, the children are taken to other states, where they are prevented from having contact with the other parent. Afterward, court ordered separation could last for months or years.

Through tears, with her mother, Jill Montes, by her side, 10-year-old Zoe Winenger testified at the April 25 committee hearing that she was traumatized at a reunification camp. On her way home after the hearing, she told her mother that testifying was the best thing she had done in her life, according to Rubio’s office.

Some at the hearing defended reunification therapy. One father said that without the judge in his case ordering it, he would not have gotten custody of his daughter. “Reunification therapy does in fact work,” he said.

In a press release after the hearing, Rubio said: “Protecting our children should always be a priority, but the legal system failed Piqui and so many other children. SB 331 will begin a systematic change in family court to prevent another family from suffering such pain.”

This is the second time the senator has introduced such a bill. Last year, pushback from the Judicial Council, which objected to the provision that mandated additional training for family court judges, forced Rubio to withdraw her bill. SB 331 is an amended version of that bill.

Several states are considering similar bills to comply with a provision in the federal Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2022. The act promises states up to $25 million in grants if their reforms comply with national requirements.

The post State Bill to Keep Children Safe in Custody Battles Passes First Hurdle appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

A video showing the violent removal of two children from a Santa Cruz home has spurred calls to ban a controversial practice that pressures children to recant claims of abuse and embrace their alleged abuser.

As previously reported by the San Francisco Public Press, Maya Laing, 15, and Sebastian Laing, 11, were removed from their father’s custody in October after a family court judge ruled that the children lied — at their father’s behest — when they alleged their mother sexually abused them. The judge ordered that the children be taken to a reunification program in Los Angeles. Proponents say that reunification camps are necessary to “deprogram” a child from the preferred parent’s brainwashing that made them believe they were abused by the other parent.

Traumatizing transport

The process begins by transporting the child to the camp, which is typically away from their hometown or even out of state, according to Tina Swithin, who is fighting to ban reunification camps.

“I’ve heard stories of children being taken off of school buses on their way home by these transport agents,” Swithin said.

Transport agents are hired to take children away, and they are not deterred by unwillingness, as witnessed in the case of Maya and Sebastian Laing. The agents in this case work for a company called Assisted Intervention Inc. Protesters and elected officials said they were disturbed by the level of violence shown in an Oct. 20, 2022, video of transporters grabbing the children and forcing them into an awaiting car. Assisted Intervention representatives declined an interview request. An email response from the company called the situation “complex” and stated that the video “showed an incomplete picture of the events.”

Catherine Barrett, a licensed clinical forensic psychologist based in Los Angeles, said the incident amounts to kidnapping. She likened it to police arrest, which is even traumatic to adults she has treated.  

“You know, forcing arms, necks bent, that power and control and losing their autonomy and their sense of self-empowerment in that moment,” Barrett said. “What that type of kidnapping, interrogation, arrest, what that does to a child long term — how they believe that builds trust, how they believe that can rebuild a relationship to me is so astounding. It’s so abusive. It’s criminal.”

Politicians react

The transporters who took the Laing children were authorized “to physically take possession” of them under the order of Santa Cruz County Superior Court Judge Rebecca Connolly, said Santa Cruz Police Deputy Chief Jon Bush. 

But after the video went viral on social media, local elected officials acted to change that authority. Less than a month after the video’s release, Santa Cruz County supervisors unanimously passed a resolution amending the County Code to impose a no touch policy on youth transport agencies, aligning them with county rules governing social services agencies. The supervisors also urged California’s elected officials to regulate youth transport companies and reunification camps, which do not require a license to operate, unlike the state’s childcare and health care centers and schools. Richard Stapler, the chief of staff for State Sen. John Laird, whose district includes Santa Cruz County, wrote in an email that his office is looking at potential legislative proposals.

“We are very early in the legislative session, so there is considerable opportunity to address this unfortunate issue,” Stapler wrote.

He’s not the only California legislator concerned about reunification camps. As previously reported by the Public Press, State Sen. Susan Rubio authored a bill in 2021 that would have banned family reunification services that sever a child from a parent with whom the child is bonded or to whom the child is attached. Rubio rescinded the bill known as Piqui’s Law in response to harsh criticism from the California Judicial Council. She has said that she plans to amend and reintroduce the bill.

Surviving a reunification camp

The number of families sent to reunification programs is hard to determine. A 2017 study showed that Canadian judges ordered children into reunification in 27% of cases involving children who judges deem are unjustifiably resisting or rejecting parental contact. The study’s author, Shely Polak, an Ontario-based social worker who spent five years researching U.S. and Canadian reunification programs for her PhD dissertation, told The Washington Post that she thinks that prevalence is much higher in the U.S.

Ally Toyos, 20, and her younger sister were 13 and 11 when they alleged that their father was sexually abusing them. After three years of family court proceedings, a judge ruled that they were lying and ordered them to attend a reunification program in Montana run by Family Bridges.

“It’s really terrifying, because you have no idea what’s going to happen to you,” Toyos said. “I honestly thought that they were going to take us somewhere and like, I don’t know, do electroshock therapy or something to try to get us to be compliant.”

The sisters were taken to a motel in Bozeman where her father was waiting along with three reunification trainers from Family Bridges, a Bay Area-based company that charges between $25,000 and $40,000 for a four-day program, according to its website. The organization’s founder, Randy Rand, oversaw Toyos’ training, but couldn’t lead sessions because he isn’t a licensed therapist. The California Board of Psychology suspended Rand’s license in 2009, and disciplined him for “unprofessional conduct,” “gross negligence,” “violation of laws governing the practice of psychology” and “dishonesty.” Family Bridges did not respond to requests for comment. 

Toyos said she and her sister repeated their abuse allegations against their father at the beginning of the program, at which point they were warned that if they didn’t recant and embrace their father, they would be sent to a psychiatric facility or a wilderness camp for troubled teens, or put into foster care. They were told to write a letter to their mother claiming that they chose to enter a facility or foster care rather than comply. At that point, the sisters began cooperating with the trainers. Toyos said the trainers then spent four days showing videos and playing mind games meant to “deprogram” them.

“It sounds like no big deal, but you’re forced to say good things about your abuser,” Toyos said. “I would call it self-betrayal trauma. Like now, I feel like I second guess whether or not I feel unsafe around someone when I so clearly do.”

After the program, the girls were placed in their father’s permanent custody until each turned 18. Today, Toyos has no contact with her father.

Reunification outcomes unclear

There is little reliable data measuring the success of reunification programs following parental alienation claims. Psychologist Richard Warshak, who helped craft the Family Bridges program and whose self-produced videos and books are often required materials, asserts a 95% success rate for repairing relationships between children and their parents, with the number dropping to 83% once children return home. But a 2022 study published in the Journal of Family Trauma, Child Custody & Child Development examined six reunification camps — including Family Bridges — and concluded that “many program tenets are questionable, and that outcome studies are too weakly designed and implemented to provide evidence of the programs’ effectiveness.”

Read the first three articles and listen to the “Civic” podcasts associated with this series:

Part one: “Coercive Control Victims Face Skeptical Judges, Court Transcripts Show”

Part two: “When Judges Dismiss Claims of Domestic Abuse, Children Can Die”

Part three: “Family Courts Rely on Dubious Theory to Dismiss Child Abuse Claims”

The post Children’s Violent Removal From Santa Cruz Home Raises Calls to End Reunification Camps appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

State Sen. Susan Rubio is planning to introduce a bill that would allow California’s 58 trial courts to digitally record civil and family law cases, a controversial effort to address statewide courtroom staffing shortages that deprive low-income litigants of official court transcripts.

The move comes two weeks after Los Angeles County Superior Court announced a slew of unprecedented financial incentives to recruit and retain court reporters.

Court reporters provide verbatim documentation of proceedings that are critical to filing appeals, reviewing judges’ behavior and reading back proceedings to jurors.

If approved, the legislation would sidestep the issue of recruiting and training more staff, which has proven a financial and logistical challenge statewide.

“This is very positive,” said Jennafer Wagner, director of programs at the Family Violence Appellate Project, which is sponsoring the bill. The nonprofit provides pro bono assistance to domestic violence survivors and their children appealing trial court decisions in California and Washington.

California law requires courts to provide court reporters in criminal felony and juvenile matters, but not in civil courts, which include family law, probate cases or matters assigned to the writs and receiver departments.

In early February, the Los Angeles County Superior Court announced that it would use nearly $10 million — its portion of $30 million the state had given to all 58 of its courts for fiscal year 2023 to provide financial incentives to “hire, retain and reward” court reporters. The court has 100 vacancies. San Francisco’s share of the state funding is $703,092.

For more than a decade, California has been experiencing an acute shortage of court reporters that has forced nearly all its courts, including San Francisco Superior Court and Los Angeles County Superior Court, the largest trial court in the nation, to hustle to fill vacant slots.

The shortage is severe and longstanding; trial courts have been eliminating court reporters in family and civil law cases as a cost-saving measure since as far back as 2012. In November, Los Angeles County Superior Court announced that it would not provide court reporters for family court hearings, despite a 2018 state Supreme Court ruling, Jameson v. Desta, that requires they be provided to poor litigants who have fee waivers. Typically, litigants must pay for court transcripts for civil hearings and trials. If an official court reporter is not available, litigants who can afford to do so may hire their own certified shorthand reporter.

The state Legislature tried unsuccessfully twice in the last decade to introduce electronic recording in courts, which faced opposition from the union that represents court reporters.

“We’re going to push back at any attempts” to switch to electronic recording, David Green, president of SEIU 721, which represents some 2,000 court reporters in Southern California, said in an interview last month when asked if the union continued to oppose California courts going digital. The move, he said, “puts people at risk,” because transcriptions generated from digital recordings are not as good as those produced by a court reporter. Green did not respond to calls seeking comment on Rubio’s bill.

Rubio’s office said the Los Angeles-area Democrat has been trying to work with the union, and that transitioning to electronic recording would not take jobs away from court reporters, but would make their jobs “better.”

The post California Could Allow Electronic Recording in Civil and Family Court, Helping Poor Litigants appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

It’s been four months since a viral video exposed the violent court-ordered removal of two Santa Cruz children from their father’s family home. The disturbing scene prompted protests on courthouse steps demanding “justice for Maya and Sebastian” and “free Maya and Sebastian,” as well as calls for action by local elected officials. But the children have yet to return.

Maya, 15, and Sebastian, 11, told a family court therapist that they were being sexually abused by their mother. They were removed from their father’s custody in October after their family court judge ruled that the children were lying and that their father was the actual child abuser because he manipulated them into making the false allegations. The judge also ordered the children into a program that would convince them to recant their allegations and reunite with their mother. Their father, Justin Laing, is unable to comment due to a gag order.

Disbelieving a child’s allegation of abuse based on the notion that the other parent brainwashed them into lying is a hotly debated legal tactic called parental alienation.

A growing chorus of international media coverage, medical groups and judicial bodies are expressing doubts over the validity of this legal defense tactic and of its practitioners.

It appears to let many abusers off the hook, according to Joan Meier, a professor of clinical law and director of the National Family Violence Law Center at the George Washington University Law School. She pointed to a 2004 study indicating that between 50% and 73% of child sexual abuse allegations during custody litigation are considered likely valid by custody evaluators and child welfare personnel. But courts on average find only 2% of child abuse claims valid.

“So, you can see by this comparison that it is extremely likely that many, many sexually abused children are being sent to their sexual abuser by courts,” Meier said. 

Despite the controversy, family courts routinely rely on parental alienation testimony.  

Survivor turns advocate

Twenty-year-old Ally Toyos — who recently changed her name from Cable — said years of abuse were added to her life when parental alienation proponent Robert Evans testified that she and her sister had been brainwashed into lying about their father’s alleged sexual, physical and emotional abuse. She was 13 and her sister was 11 when they first made the allegations of abuse.

“He actually called in to testify from Florida,” Toyos said. “And I had never met him. My mom had never met him.”

The judge determined that her mother’s brainwashing constituted psychological abuse. So, three years after they made their initial allegations, the girls were placed in their father’s custody where Toyos said his abuse persisted until they were able to leave when they each turned 18.

Today, Toyos belongs to a Bay Area organization called Center for Judicial Excellence, which fights harmful family court decisions. As previously reported in the Public Press, the group’s efforts to mandate education for judges and court personnel to better assess allegations of child abuse have been unsuccessful so far, thanks in part to resistance from the California Judicial Council, which represents judges and other judiciary branch staff.

Dubious origins

Parental alienation was conceived in the mid-1980s by Richard Gardner, an unpaid, part-time clinical professor of child psychiatry at Columbia University. He claimed without evidence that vindictive mothers psychologically abuse their children by brainwashing them into lying in 90% of cases where fathers are accused of sexual abuse. He diagnosed it as a psychological syndrome — a finding that never made it into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and was roundly rejected by the psychiatric community. Nevertheless, Gardner was a prolific expert witness in child custody cases, testifying in roughly 400 cases in 25 states — the vast majority of which advocated putting children in the custody of the parent that they claimed abused them.

A 1996 American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry journal article stated that Gardner’s book, “Protocols for the Sex-Abuse Evaluation,” was “a recipe for finding allegations of sexual abuse false, under the guise of clinical and scientific objectivity. One suspects it will be a bestseller among defence attorneys.”

Legal approach in dispute

Toronto-based lawyer Brian Ludmer regularly relies on parental alienation theory in his law practice in Canada and is called upon to act as a strategic advisor on parental alienation in cases across North America. When a child abuse accusation arises, he files a counter claim on his client’s behalf and brings in parental alienation experts to testify that the accusations are due to the other parent’s psychological abuse and manipulation of their child. He said he’s never had a client whose child abuse allegations were “substantiated as true.”

He said he believes that parents routinely psychologically abuse children by manipulating them into making false allegations of abuse. But the prevalence of sexual abuse within the family unit is another matter.

“This is so rare,” he said. “How many are so sick that they would abuse their own children rather than somebody else’s children, right? Because genetically, we have a protective instinct for own children.”

But U.S. Department of Justice data shows that half of predators committing sexual assault against kids younger than 6 are family members.

Los Angeles-based child forensic psychiatrist Catherine Barrett said focusing on the child rather than the alleged sexual abuser plays into the hands of abusive parents who claim parental alienation as a distraction to derail proceedings.

“We have a child that has been abused that has now become a pawn of the courts,” Barrett said.

Studies sow doubt

Several international studies have also generated significant uncertainty around the theory. One recent study disputed the idea that bad-mouthing one parent promotes alienation toward the other at all. In fact, it will probably backfire against the disparaging parent. The study revealed that when alienation does occur, it’s more likely due to upsetting behavior by the rejected parent like substance use, uncontrolled mental illness and child abuse.

The theory’s validity is also undermined by being unequally applied between men and women. Meier’s 2019 study revealed that when a mother alleges child abuse and the father counter claims parental alienation, the chances of her losing custody virtually doubles. When fathers allege that mothers are abusive, they are not dismissed as readily when mothers counter claim alienation.

The United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner has taken notice of this and is investigating the trend. The office announced a call for feedback by Dec. 15, 2022, on custody cases involving violence against women and children with a special focus on parental alienation.

Read the three other articles and listen to the “Civic” podcasts associated with this series:

Part one: “Coercive Control Victims Face Skeptical Judges, Court Transcripts Show”

Part two: “When Judges Dismiss Claims of Domestic Abuse, Children Can Die”

Part four: “Children’s Violent Removal From Santa Cruz Home Raises Calls to End Reunification Camps”

CORRECTION 2/24/23: Ally Toyos was 13 and her sister was 11 when they first alleged that their father had abused them. This story has been updated to clarify the timing of that event. Three years later, he was granted full custody of the girls until they became adults at 18.

The post Family Courts Rely on Dubious Theory to Dismiss Child Abuse Claims appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Most recently, the radio team has been developing a series about the way family courts handle allegations of abuse. And in a nutshell, what I’ve learned is not good. 

It all began last fall when the “Civic” team thought it would be interesting to interview reporter Viji Sundaram about a series of articles she recently wrote for the Public Press. The “Civic” episode featuring Viji revealed the way family court judges often dismiss a form of domestic abuse called coercive control. 

As part of my research, I looked for victims of abuse who were mistreated in family court. Those are not easy conversations. It’s a tough balance asking people to talk about their most traumatic experiences while being careful not to retraumatize them.

But as soon as I started reaching out, we got a landslide of social media messages, texts and emails from people who were eager to talk about their horrific stories. And they felt that injustices happening in family court are vastly underreported. 

I found out that over the last 10 years, hundreds of children across the country have been killed after family court judges dismissed abuse allegations. In response to this trend, state Sen. Susan Rubio tried to get a bill passed that would expand the California Family Code to include coercive control in family court hearings and criminal trials. That version of the bill failed (another is in the works) and we thought the movement behind it merited a second episode. 

Now we’re about to release our third episode of a four-part series on abuse allegations and family courts. This episode is about the industry built around defending people accused of child abuse. It ramped up about 40 years ago with one man’s pseudo psychological theory called parental alienation syndrome. 

His name was Richard Gardner, and he gained undue credibility as an unpaid, part-time Clinical Professor of child psychiatry at Columbia University, which allowed him to launch his moneymaker: being hired as an expert witness in child custody cases. His online biography says he testified in about 400 cases in 25 states, and repeatedly got away with claiming, without evidence, that vindictive mothers brainwash their kids into lying in 90% of cases where fathers are accused of sexual abuse. 

Gardner’s theory has elicited vigorous pushback and has been denounced by many academic studies going back to the 1990s, when the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry predicted that lawyers would have a field day with this theory. And that’s exactly what happened, despite the professional outcry. 

Gardner’s cottage industry has become a booming business of paid witnesses who claim expertise in parental alienation. And family court judges regularly grant custody to a parent accused of abuse after hearing expert witnesses testify that the other parent brainwashed their child into lying. 

One lawyer who uses Gardner’s theories to defend clients accused of child abuse told me that in all his cases, the court decided the child was lying about being abused. Today, dozens of adults who were accused of lying as kids — and handed over to parents they said were abusing them — say they were telling the truth. I talked to one who is fighting against harmful family court decisions and trying to stop what happened to her from happening to other children.

I’m working with our producer, Liana Wilcox, to finish a “Civic” episode set to air next week about the harm caused by these theories. We’ll let you know when you can find it on our website in an upcoming newsletter. Subscribe to “Civic” from the San Francisco Public Press on your favorite podcast platform to access the episode as soon as it’s available. 

The post Reporter’s Notebook: When Family Court Fails appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Lawmakers, experts and advocates across California are pushing for legislation that would make judges take regular training in recognizing domestic violence and child abuse. The crusade is an attempt to lessen the chances that a judge will place a child in the custody of a dangerous parent.

Family court judges routinely decide that domestic abuse claims are not credible and grant custody to the allegedly abusive parent. But making the wrong call can end with children losing their lives.

Pallavi Dhawan, director of domestic violence policy for the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office, said that mothers can end up being punished for claiming in family court that the father is abusing the child.

“The fathers will often counterclaim that the mother is trying to alienate the father from the child,” Dhawan said. “And so the judge will oftentimes give weight to that counterclaim and then punish the mother and give the father custody or visitation rights when the mother is seeking sole custody, believing that the mother is fabricating the claim.”

Fathers who initiate claims of abuse against mothers do not get the same treatment, according to a 2019 study on child custody by Joan Meier, director of the National Family Law Violence Center at George Washington University. The study showed that courts lack impartiality and neutrality when domestic abuse is alleged.  It concluded that there is an “apparent systemic gender bias against women” in U.S. family courts.

The consequences for dismissing claims of abuse can be dire. The Center for Judicial Excellence, an organization advocating for judicial accountability and child safety in family courts, said that 864 children have been murdered by separating or divorcing parents in the United States since 2008. For more than a decade, the center has tracked these deaths through news coverage in which divorce, separation, custody, visitation or child support was mentioned.

San Francisco resident Lesley Hu is the mother of one of nine children in California who died in 2021 at the hands of an abusive parent during a divorce.

Hu was married to Stephen O’Loughlin for five years before separating in 2015. They agreed to share custody of their then-3-year-old son Pierce. But when O’Loughlin insisted without evidence that Pierce was vaccine intolerant — even though the boy’s pediatrician said that he was a normal, healthy child — Hu appealed for medical custody in San Francisco family court.

In 2021, the judge in the case initially gave Hu sole custody. But he reversed himself and ordered a shared custody arrangement while giving O’Loughlin time to find evidence that Pierce was vaccine intolerance. That was Jan. 12, 2021. Pierce stayed with his father that night. The following day, O’Loughlin murdered their son and killed himself.

“Steve shot Pierce while he was sleeping and then he hung himself. That didn’t succeed, so he had to shoot himself like an utter coward,” Hu said.

Research by Lisa Fontes, author of “Invisible Chains: Overcoming Coercive Control in Your Intimate Relationship,” showed that in 20% to 30% of cases of domestic homicide, there are no prior physical acts of violence. During a webinar for the organization Domestic Shelters, Fontes said family courts can enable domestic abusers to further victimize their former partner and children during divorce or separation.

“The court system, the legal system, is supposed to be here to make us all safer, it’s supposed to be here to assure our rights,” Fontes said. “And so, it’s particularly tormenting for both the target of coercive control and children to find that the courts are not protecting them, that they are serving as an arm of further abuse by the domestic abuser. So, we really need to educate judges, attorneys and the general public about legal abuse.”

California state Sen. Susan Rubio introduced a bill in June 2022 known as Piqui’s law that would mandate training for judges on child abuse and domestic violence. She rescinded the bill last month after encountering strong pushback from the Judicial Council of California.

In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee opposing Piqui’s bill, the Judicial Council of California wrote that the bill “represents an impermissible interference in the operations of the judicial branch,” and that it creates “serious concerns about impartiality and neutrality.”

Supporters of the measure aren’t backing down. Among them is Kathleen Russell, founding executive director of the Center for Judicial Excellence.

“We’re regrouping and going to be reintroducing Piqui’s law next year,” Russell said.

The post When Judges Dismiss Claims of Domestic Abuse, Children Can Die appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

The council, which represents judges and other judiciary branch staff, sent a letter to the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Aug. 24, saying additional continuing education requirements would “overwhelm” judges with work. The group called the mandate “duplicative and unnecessary in light of the robust training that judicial officers and court-connected staff already receive.”

The Judicial Council also argued that imposing targeted training topics could “implicate an advocacy agenda intended to improperly influence judicial impartiality” and open the door to pressure from other special interests that could skew its ability to rule fairly.

State Sen. Susan Rubio, a Democrat from Baldwin Park who introduced Senate Bill 616, nicknamed Piqui’s Law, said she wanted to continue to work on it, add amendments and reintroduce it later. The Assembly unanimously passed a version in early August.

“It is unfortunate that the Judicial Council’s resistance stifled our ability to include stronger protections for victims,” Rubio said in a Sept. 1 statement. She said that in early June she put forward the bill “because children continue to be murdered at the hands of an abusive parent during custody disputes.”

Piqui’s Law would have included provisions that:

• Required evidence-based training for judges and court personnel on domestic violence and related topics. The training would have added 25 hours of orientation training for new judges who sit in family law on top of the 30 hours they are currently required to undergo. Additionally, the bill required a minimum of 20 hours of continuing judicial education every three years thereafter. The training includes coercive control, the subject of a 2020 California law that allows victims to claim nonviolent abuse or manipulation in cases involving custody or temporary restraining orders. The Public Press found in a recent series that not all judges apply the law equally.
• Restricted expert testimony in custody hearings to those who have previous first-hand experience in such cases.
• Done away with the court-ordered “reunification therapy” services, which a judge can order if a child is reluctant to see one parent after a divorce. The nationwide practice is designed to encourage children to emotionally reunite with an abusive parent they have been separated from.
• Required judges to consider any past or current sexual or physical abuse by the accused parent.

Much of the language in Piqui’s Law was inspired by a federal regulation called Kayden’s Law, a provision in the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2022, which President Biden signed in March. It was named after a 7-year-old Pennsylvania girl, Kayden Mancuso, murdered by her father in 2018 during an unsupervised visit. Her death spotlighted the country’s weak child custody process.

The child’s death spurred Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican, to work with Joan Meier, a professor of clinical law and director of the National Family Violence Law Center at George Washington Law, to introduce Kayden’s law, a court reform measure in Congress. Meier hoped the legislation would serve as a blueprint for states to pass their own versions. The federal reform promised grants, capped at $25 million, to states with child protection systems that adhere to its guidelines.

Rubio’s bill earned its nickname, Piqui’s Law, in honor of Aramazd Andressian Jr., a 5-year-old South Pasadena boy whose father suffocated him in 2017 in the back seat of his car. The father later said his motive was anger at his wife for divorcing him. He is serving a 25-year-to-life sentence.

Ana Estevez, the boy’s mother, had fought unsuccessfully in family court to get full custody, saying she was worried about her estranged husband’s abusive behavior. Eight months before the killing, a judge denied her request for a restraining order.

“Piqui was among those innocent children and one of the reasons behind our national movement to reform the judicial system,” Rubio said in her public statement.

Meier said she had worked with Rubio in drafting Piqui’s law. She said last month that the bill had been significantly weakened as it made its way through the Legislature and was a “fragmented version of the original federal model.”

Despite repeated requests, Rubio’s office declined to tell the San Francisco Public Press what provisions had been stripped from the original bill.

Among groups that opposed the bill were Mothers Against Child Abuse, Family Reunion and The Hero’s Circle, which advocates for adult children who live in homes with only one parent after that parent had “alienated” them against the other. Members of The Hero’s Circle said they opposed Piqui’s Law because it just focused on domestic violence training while neglecting “many other aspects of child development, personality disorder and family dynamics.”

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Aug. 24, Sen. Andreas Borgeas, R-Fresno, said that “as meritorious as more education and continuing education are” for the judiciary, he was “initially concerned” that we are “building and building a curricula on top of those that work in the system.”

He said that some of his judicial districts have some of the busiest dockets in the nation and by mandating more training judges will be so overwhelmed that “at some point the system could break.”

But supporters of the bill who showed up at the hearing said such legislation could improve child welfare and, as one speaker put it, stop “preventable homicides.”

The Center for Judicial Excellence, a San Rafael-based nonprofit group founded in 2006 to hold judges accountable, had worked closely with Rubio on Piqui’s Law and sponsored the bill. The center’s Executive Director Kathleen Russell said Rubio would likely reintroduce the bill next year with unspecified amendments.

Russell said she had fought for more than a decade to eliminate reunification therapy programs in California and across the country, describing the practice as “harmful and traumatic.”

On Aug. 28, the Institute on Violence, Abuse and Trauma hosted a conference in San Diego in which three people who were sent to “reunification camps” told their stories. One of them compared her experience of being taken out of her home as an “abduction.”

Ally Cable, 20, said she was forced by the courts to “reunify” with her father when she was 16. Cable said she had been sexually abused by him and forcibly taken to a camp in Bozeman, Mont. There, therapists worked alongside her father, who shared custody of her, to try to recreate an emotional bond between them. “They treated me like a criminal,” Cable said. “It was terrifying.”

But at least one person who disagreed that the therapy was harmful, spoke at the Aug. 24 senate hearing. Beverly Hills-based family law attorney and psychologist Virginia Griffin Donnell said that that provision in Rubio’s bill was a “blind spot” and advocates who speak against the therapy have a “nefarious agenda.” 

“It’s an insidious form of child abuse called parental alienation,” asserted Griffin Donnell.

California’s child custody laws, despite some good provisions, are not working, say childcare advocates. According to data from the Center for Judicial Excellence, since 2008 the nation has logged at least 859 reported cases of children killed by abusive parents during divorce or separation proceedings. Many died during family court-ordered visitation despite evidence that they were in danger.

Russell said California has the highest number of preventable child murders in the country, three times more than Texas and five times more than New York.

“These deaths are not just random, violent tragedies,” Rubio and Russell co-wrote in an Aug. 17 opinion piece in The Sacramento Bee. “They are often preventable and due to mistakes or bias in the family court system.”

They added that in California, “the courts operate with almost no meaningful oversight and very limited training for judges and other court personnel on domestic violence and child abuse.”

In Pennsylvania, a bill called Kayden’s Law is now working its way through the Legislature. Its aim is to make child welfare and safety primary concerns in custody disputes. It too calls for domestic abuse training for judges and court personnel.

Meier said about 20 states are currently readying to introduce their own versions of Kayden’s Law, and nearly all of them are facing headwinds from judges.

CORRECTION 9/16/22: Corrects the number of Senate Bill 616, which is nicknamed Piqui’s Law.

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