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
Charge
Federal 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