California Coalition for Families and Children 4891 Pacific Hwy., Ste. 102

San Diego, CA 92110 Cole.Stuart@Lexevia.com

D: 858.504.0171

April 10, 2014

Governor Jerry Brown State Capitol, Suite 1173 Sacramento, CA 95814

Re : Report of Illegal Activity Among California Family Courts; California Coalition for Families and Children et al. v. San Diego County Bar Association et al., United States District Court, Southern District of California Case No. 13-cv-1944 CAB (BLM)

Dear Governor Brown:

I write to request you attention to a pattern of illegal activity within our state Superior Court system and ask for your help in remedying ongoing exploitation and oppression of families and children in our State. I am the President of California Coalition for Families and Children, PBC, a public benefit corporation comprised of parents and children organized to protect and promote parental autonomy, rights, and interests in domestic dispute and juvenile justice matters. I am also a lawyer and a parent.

California Coalition has recently filed a lawsuit on behalf of its California members in United States District Court for the Southern District of California. I enclose a copy of the complaint in that matter. The allegations detail patterns of illegal collaboration between San Diego Superior Court Family Division judges, divorce attorneys, and the San Diego City Attorneys Office. These activities include patterns of fraud, extortion, and abuse of parents and children by Family Court psychologist custody evaluators who are appointed or hired to assist families undergoing divorce or family law matters.

Our efforts in alerting the courts to these illegal abhorrent practices have been met with aggressive oppression. Local law enforcement has been deaf to our requests for protection. The complaint details the prosecution of our parenting group by San Diego City Attorney Jan Goldsmith in collusion with the San Diego County Bar Association and several county judges. It describes the efforts of Coalition members including Eileen Lasher, a mother who has been threatened and even arrested by the San Diego Superior Court in her efforts toward reform. Dr. Emad Tadros, M.D. is a father and Board Certified Psychiatrist and Neurologist practicing medicine at Scripps Medical Center in San Diego. He is a highly-respected member of the American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, and past Vice Chief of Scripps Behavioral

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health Services. As a behavioral health professional he identified deviant practices among family court psychologists, and brought the issues to the attention of the Family Courts. Rather than gratitude, the courts sanctioned him for bringing a lawsuit against a leading custody evaluator psychologist, Dr. Stephen Doyne. He has been attacked personally and professionally, so much so he has quieted his efforts in support of reform despite maintaining strong convictions.

I have represented the Coalition as its lawyer, President, and a parent in our reform efforts since 2008. As a lawyer practicing in California since 1995 I recognize how my own legal community is also a center of the problem, driving conflict-oriented solutions. Attorneys do so by stoking the already heightened emotions, and playing to the unfortunately common ignorance of our own clients. Unchecked, emotions and ignorance are easily converted into litigious clients, depleting public and private resources to resolve conflict which didnt exist before becoming involved in a court system that depends on conflict.

Yet my efforts to reform my professional community has been met with resistance in the form of violence. In 2010 I was arrested at a meeting of the San Diego County Bar Associationa group I have been a lawyer member of since beginning my practice in San Diego in 1995while peacefully participating in a Family Law Practice Subsection seminar event. I was illegally prosecuted and spent fourteen months in San Diego County jail. The complaint details the coordinated lawlessness of the prosecution leading to my illegal imprisonment.

Were asking for your help in reigning in certain practices of our Family Courts. These courts have adopted an extravagant scheme of requiring families in a divorce to hire private child psychologists to assist parents in a custody dispute. The psychologists are extremely expensive at $350.00 per hour or more. Judges require parents to cooperate and pay for them or face losing custody. Once appointed, they assume reign over minute aspects of a divorcing familys life, and yet may not be fired without severe repercussion. They are trained as clinical psychologists, but offer opinions on the states best interests of the child standardan extremely vague benchmark which even psychologists decry as unscientific. The evaluator best interests opinions create a vehicle for defrauding unsophisticated parents who, trusting in an authority figure psychologist or judge, invest a familys future in attempting to win a custody battle. Yet the opinions are little more than sleekly-packaged bias, speculation, and junk science. Details of this custody evaluator fraud scheme are available at our website at www.weightiermatter.com. Exhibit 2 to the attached complaint provides additional detail of this process, and describes how it is going very, very wrong in San Diego.

Middle class parents nationwide are enduring similar catastrophes, often absorbing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of family savingswealth far better saved for a childs education. An excellent description of the debacle has recently been the subject of a documentary film entitled DivorceCorpproduced and direct by a San Diego entrepreneur, Joeseph Sorge, in cooperation with several Los Angeles-based film

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producers. It focusses on Californias divorce industry, identifying events and entities with which you will be familiar. Previews of the film are available free on YouTube and the entire film is available for download on ITunes.

The problem arises because of the peculiar nature of Family Court jurisdiction and lack of federal and state oversight. Family courts exercise an unusual form of equity jurisdiction which gives them virtually unlimited authority, discretion, and few reviewable questions of law for appeal. There is little federal oversight through civil rights actions. Many federal courts have abstained from accepting even when they assert violations of federal civil rights laws, and state actors regularly assert immunities under the Eleventh Amendment or personal immunities for judicial or quasi-judicial activities. Attorneys have little exposure to malpractice lawsuits as the entire divorce industry has set its own best practices to incorporate fraud and extortion as the relevant standard of care. The industry regards itself as untouchable by its own vulnerable client basefamilies in crisis.

The result of this unusual absence of checks and balances has become a perfect storm of unchecked power, absence of meaningful oversight, and financially-motivated professionals who operate the systemlawyers, psychologists, and county-level bureaucrats, none of whom are open to input from litigants. Litigants encounter the system as a revolving door process with short term goals. There is no longer term litigant-side input to protect the legal and ethical integrity of the processes which deployed and policed by the system operators themselves. The resulting exploitation ruins families while enriching attorneys, psychologists, social workers, and judges who administer the processes they, and they alone, created.

Solutions

Your office can assist in many ways. We urge you to immediately direct the attention of law enforcement to the ongoing illegal activity identified in the complaint.

Others solutions include encouraging or require use of meaningful alternative dispute resolution services in all Family Court cases. We suggest that even though Family Court matters are often difficult, collaborative and inexpensive solutions are not embraced because the existing interests directing litigants have no incentive to do so. Sponsored mediation and collaborative solutions are competition for attorneys and psychologists. Courts decry budget difficulties yet administer extraordinarily meticulous processes in a divorce. There are abundant solutions that dont require more funding, but they cant achieve adoption while entrenched interests desire their failure.

Existing potential solutions include sponsored genuine mediation (not evaluation which pits parents in acrimony) by truly neutral professionals, dispute resolution education, programs, and coursework such as UpToParents for parents and professionals, and support for domestic dispute reform legislation, litigation, and parenting networks such as California Coalition to refocus the struggle away from

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personal conflict or social or political ideology implementation to healthy outcomes for parents and children alike.

We also support adoption of technological solutions to facilitate what should be ordinary interactions between divorcing parentschild drop-offs, visitation, vacations and holidays, and other necessary co-parenting events that today often cannot be accomplished without court intervention. Citizens who have little choice but to utilize court services to accomplish what many families do with ease-such as schedule time with our children or resolve financial issues with a co-parentare often caught in unnecessarily wasteful trap of conflict. We enthusiastically support adoption of existing technology to promote efficiency and reduce conflict, and can provide your office with additional references for such resources on request.

At a policy level, we urge more careful vetting of judicial candidates. Judges who approach their public duties with strong political or ideological agendas or weak respect for state and federal litigant rights are easily manipulated by family court regulars. Parents or lawyers who seek to exploit these judges know how to tweak a case to suit a judges ideological leanings, needlessly attack a spouse, and escalate litigation costs. Selecting and disciplining judges to eliminate social or political agendas from the process and returning decision-making to parents promotes dignity, integrity, and ultimately financial stability for parents, children, and even Family Courts themselves. Disciplined judges with strong integrity and the utmost respect for state and federal law are qualities we perceive as largely absent from the family court bench.

Divorce attorneys and Family Court judges have failed usthey offer unhealthy institutional or coercive solutions to deeply personal issues that will never work no matter how much money is invested in them. Parents in crisis need support, perhaps education, and and guidance toward longer-term solutions, not judgment, litigation, and endless paperwork. Theyre today being sold an extraordinarily harmful and expensive solution that only solves the financial goals of those who administer the solution. We ask for your action. Our futuresquite literallyare at stake.

Thank you for your attention.

Sincerely,

Colbern C. Stuart, III, J.D., President, California Coalition for Families and Children

Colbern C. Stuart III

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cc: Commission on Judicial Nominees Evaluation of the State Bar of California

Commission on Judicial Performance

Ms. Laura Duffy, Esq., United States Attorney, Southern District of California

Ms. Daphne Hearn, Special Agent In ChargeFederal Bureau of Investigation

Ms. Bonnie Dumanis, Esq., District Attorney, County of San Diego

Mayor Kevin Faulconer

Mr. Robert Brewer, Esq.

Mr. Steve Cooley, Esq.

The San Diego Union Tribune

California Coalition for Families and Children, PBC Membership