California Family Courts Helping Pedophiles, Batterers Get Child Custody
Allegations of domestic violence or child molestation were backed up by criminal convictions — and, in one case, a murder-suicide. In all of them, the courts seem to have failed to follow basic procedures, including some dictated by state law, for weighing evidence of a parent's abusiveness before making crucial custody decisions.
Amplify’d from www.sfweekly.com
Looking out for the children who find themselves in the middle of bitter divorces is the most important function of the state's family courts, and arguably one of the most significant duties of the judiciary as a whole. Yet evidence has mounted in recent years that it is a responsibility in which family court officials are sometimes failing dramatically.
Interviews with dozens of parents, activists, lawyers, judges, children, and former family court employees, as well as a review of hundreds of pages of family and criminal court documents, indicate that the system's methods for assessing whether child sexual abuse or spousal battery has taken place — findings that are critical to deciding whether a parent should retain custody of or visitation rights with a child — fall short of the standards accepted by domestic-violence experts and the criminal-justice community.
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