NEW YORK -- A large batch of secret American diplomatic cables over the past three years offers an unusual look at back-channel discussions by embassies around the world, unflattering views of world leaders and stark evaluations of nuclear and terrorist threats, The New York Times reported Sunday.
The disclosures in the Times and four other major world news organizations could fuel a worldwide diplomacy crisis with the United States at its center. "It is nothing short of a political meltdown for U.S. foreign policy," said Der Spiegel, the German publication that, like The Times, obtained the secret cables.
The White House condemned the disclosure of classified documents and released a statement Sunday saying, in part: "We anticipate release of what are claimed to be several hundred thousand classified State Department cables on Sunday night that detail diplomatic discussions with foreign governments. By its very nature, field reporting to Washington is candid and often incomplete information. It is not an expression of policy, nor does it shape final policy decisions." The statement acknowledged that the cables could "compromise private discussions with foreign governments and opposition leaders,'' and warned that the disclosures put diplomats and intelligence and other officials at risk.
The cables were initially obtained by WikiLeaks, a website dedicated to obtaining and disseminating government secrets. Late Sunday, WikiLeaks issued a statement saying the leaked cables are the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain. The website said that the cables, which date from
1966 until the end of February this year, will be released in stages over the next few months. WikiLeaks claimed that the documents show the extent of United States spying on its allies and the United Nations; overlooking or accepting corruption and human rights abuse in friendly states; doing backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; and lobbying for American corporations.
"Every American schoolchild is taught that George Washington – the country's first president – could not tell a lie," WikiLeaks said. "If the administrations of his successors lived up to the same principle, today's document flood would be a mere embarrassment. Instead, the U.S. government has been warning governments -- even the most corrupt -- around the world about the coming leaks and is bracing itself for the exposures."
The cache of a quarter-million U.S. diplomatic cables were obtained in turn by the Times, Der Spiegel in Germany, The Guardian in Britain, Le Monde in France and El País in Spain. The cables constitute the third bundle of classified material involving the United States released by WikiLeaks to selected news media in the past six months.
The cables, most of them from the past three years, reportedly reveal the Obama administration's communications and discussions over foreign crises. Among startling revelations, The Guardian disclosed that Arab leaders privately urged an air strike on Iran and that American officials have been ordered to spy on the United Nations leadership.
Such revelations have thrown Washington into a worldwide diplomatic crisis. The expected disclosure of the cables had reportedly alarmed the diplomatic establishment in Washington and other world capitals in the past days.
Anticipating an uproar, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and American ambassadors around the world have been contacting foreign officials in recent days to alert them to the expected disclosures, The Times said Sunday.
The cables are part of the daily traffic between the State Department and some 270 embassies and consulates and, according to the Times, amount to a secret account of Washington's relations with the world in an era of global terrorism.
Among disclosures that could potentially cause a problem for Washington, according to The Guardian, are fears in Washington and London over Pakistan's nuclear program; suspected links between the Russian government and organized crime; criticism of British military operations in Afghanistan; and claims of inappropriate behavior by a British royal family member.
The Times cited "gaming out an eventual collapse of North Korea: American and South Korean officials have discussed the prospects for a unified Korea, should the North's economic troubles and political transition lead the state to implode. The South Koreans even considered commercial inducements to China, according to the American ambassador to Seoul. She told Washington in February that South Korean officials believe that the right business deals would 'help salve' China's 'concerns about living with a reunified Korea' that is in a 'benign alliance' with the United States.''
The Times also cited "suspicions of corruption in the Afghan government: When Afghanistan's vice president visited the United Arab Emirates last year, local authorities working with the Drug Enforcement Administration discovered that he was carrying $52 million in cash. With wry understatement, a cable from the American Embassy in Kabul called the money 'a significant amount' that the official, Ahmed Zia Massoud, 'was ultimately allowed to keep without revealing the money's origin or destination.' (Mr. Massoud denies taking any money out of Afghanistan.)"
The Times said that more than 251,287 cables, first obtained by WikiLeaks, were obtained by the newspaper from an intermediary to whom the newspaper promised anonymity. Many of the documents, the Times said, were unclassified and none were marked "top secret." But some 11,000 are classified "secret."
The Times concluded that the cables demonstrated that "the dark shadow of terrorism still dominates the United States' relations with the world." The Times said it planned to publish details of the revelations in the coming days.
In a critical article Sunday, Der Spiegel concluded: "Never before in history has a superpower lost control of such vast amounts of such sensitive information -- data that can help paint a picture of the foundation upon which U.S. foreign policy is built. Never before has the trust America's partners have in the country been as badly shaken. Now, their own personal views and policy recommendations have been made public -- as have America's true view of them."
As for WikiLeaks, the U.S. Justice Department and other agencies have been investigating the website for potential violation of national security laws. In the meantime, the controversial founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is under investigation in Sweden on allegations that he sexually abused two women while visiting that country last summer. Assange, an Australian master hacker, is believed to be living in London.
Original Link- http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/11/28/leaking-of-secret-u-s-cables-sparks-diplomacy-crisis/?icid=main%7Chtmlws-main-w%7Cdl2%7Csec1_lnk3%7C186900
More-
http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/hillary-rodham-clinton-promises-aggressive-response-to-wikileaks/1973694
http://www.aolnews.com/surge-desk/article/is-wikileaks-a-terrorist-organization-rep-peter-king-thinks-so/19736963
http://www.aolnews.com/surge-desk/article/wikileaks-3-diplomatic-disaster-or-snoozefest/19736391
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/11/29/hillary-clinton-u-s-deeply-regrets-release-of-diplomatic-cab/
My two cents- (tongue in cheek) No! Say it aint so!!
I wonder how many of these "Officials" are wishing they knew this before hand?
I guess they didn't get their 'Birth Card Reports,' I won't begin a new year without one!
Having my 'Birth Card Report' could have changed my life..
Monday, November 29, 2010
Friday, November 19, 2010
Marine to face charges he threatened judge
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A U.S. Marine charged with threatening an Allegheny County Family Court judge on Facebook will have to face the counts against him.
Seth Miller, 20, is charged with retaliation against a judicial officer, after posting threats in June against Judge David N. Wecht in a Facebook conversation with his brother.
At the time, Mr. Miller was deployed to Afghanistan. He was angry because Judge Wecht signed off on an order granting Mr. Miller's wife support, and the courts seized $5,000 from his bank account.
Mr. Miller is stationed in Fort Lejeune, N.C.
Judge Wecht testified at a hearing on Wednesday that he learned about the threat when it was brought to his attention by a sheriff's office commander.
Mr. Miller's defense attorney, James DePasquale, asked Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey A. Manning to dismiss the charges against his client, saying he never had personal contact with the judge and that there wasn't enough evidence to support them.
Judge Manning disagreed.
Original Article- http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10322/1104205-455.stm
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A U.S. Marine charged with threatening an Allegheny County Family Court judge on Facebook will have to face the counts against him.
Seth Miller, 20, is charged with retaliation against a judicial officer, after posting threats in June against Judge David N. Wecht in a Facebook conversation with his brother.
At the time, Mr. Miller was deployed to Afghanistan. He was angry because Judge Wecht signed off on an order granting Mr. Miller's wife support, and the courts seized $5,000 from his bank account.
Mr. Miller is stationed in Fort Lejeune, N.C.
Judge Wecht testified at a hearing on Wednesday that he learned about the threat when it was brought to his attention by a sheriff's office commander.
Mr. Miller's defense attorney, James DePasquale, asked Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey A. Manning to dismiss the charges against his client, saying he never had personal contact with the judge and that there wasn't enough evidence to support them.
Judge Manning disagreed.
Original Article- http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10322/1104205-455.stm
Friday, November 12, 2010
State inspector general pushes for government watchdog
Corrupt Albany politicians may have finally met their match.
State Inspector General Joseph Fisch yesterday proposed the creation of a crimebusting office with sweeping powers to investigate all branches of state and local governments -- including members of the scandal-scarred Legislature.
"These are drastic times that require unorthodox solutions," Fisch told The Post.
He said he wanted a watchdog "with the authority and power and jurisdiction to look at the whole ball of wax."
TEAM ANDY INCLUDES EL-RAZER
NO KHALID TRIAL IN NYC: CUOMO
Fisch noted that, under the law, the state inspector general only has authority to probe wrongdoing in the state executive branch or officers who fall under the employ of the governor -- not state lawmakers.
And he said there was no credible, independent agency to police the Legislature.
A beefed-up corruption-fighting agency would require approval of the governor and Legislature. Fisch said the appointment of the agency should be made by Gov.-elect Andrew Cuomo.
"He has demonstrated his commitment to reform," Fisch said during a meeting with The Post editorial board.
Asked if the state's legislative leaders are committed to ethics reform, Fisch said, "I think the facts speak for themselves."
His bold plan comes on the heels of a devastating report he issued about the Aqueduct casino bid-rigging scandal.
The probe accused Albany players -- particularly Senate Democratic leader John Sampson and other key Senate officials -- of cavorting with lobbyists to steer the contract to a favored bidder, AEG.
A rogues' gallery of lawmakers from both parties has ended up in handcuffs for various crimes in recent years, largely thanks to federal prosecutors -- not state ethics probers.
They include former Queens Assemblyman and labor leader Brian McLaughlin, Queens Assemblyman Tony Seminerio, ex-Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno and Bronx Sen. Guy Velella, among others.
Fisch said a new watchdog agency could be modeled after the defunct State Investigations Commission.
"I was saddened by the elimination of an entity which had all the authority and power to look at every aspect of government -- city, local, state, legislature, judiciary, executive -- everything," Fisch said.
Fisch said he intends to meet with Cuomo to discuss corruption fighting and ethics reform.
A Cuomo spokesman, asked about Fisch's proposal, referred to the incoming governor's "Clean Up Albany" campaign policy book.
In it, Cuomo proposed setting up an "independent" state ethics commission with enforcement powers to probe and punish ethics violations and law-breaking by members of the executive and legislative branches.
Government watchdogs consider the Legislative Ethics Commission, which should police lawmakers but rarely does, a joke.
Original Link- http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/albany_slimebuster_5Yym5mc7blpDIW0SQwwfrK
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Woman: Poppy Seeds, Not Drugs, Led to Losing Child
The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania filed a federal lawsuit on Oct. 28 on behalf of Elizabeth Mort and Alex Rodriguez, whose newborn daughter, Isabella, was seized and held for five days by Lawrence County Children and Youth Services after Mort says she failed a hospital drug test because she had recently eaten a bagel with poppy seeds.
(Nov. 10) -- The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of a Pennsylvania couple whose baby was taken away from them after the mother failed a drug test. The ACLU says the mom is drug free and blames the failed test on a poppy-seed bagel.
"This was devastating on our whole family," Elizabeth Mort, 21, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "I held her for a few minutes, and they took her and left. I was devastated. I just cried and cried and cried."
Mort's daughter, Isabella Rodriguez, was born on April 27 at Jameson Hospital's North Campus in Lawrence County. Before the birth, per hospital policy, Mort was required to submit a urine sample for drug testing. She agreed to the test but reportedly was not told the results.
On April 30, the day after Mort was discharged from the hospital, a caseworker with Lawrence County Children and Youth Services obtained an emergency order and removed the baby from Mort's New Castle, Pa., home because she had allegedly tested positive for opiates.
According to the lawsuit, the level of opiates in Mort's system was well below federal workplace drug testing standards and was caused by Mort ingesting a bagel containing poppy seeds before giving birth. The lawsuit also alleges that Mort passed a subsequent drug test and that Children and Youth Services admitted the mistake, but kept her daughter in foster care for five days before finally returning her to her parents.
The lawsuit, filed by the ACLU in Oakland, Pa., seeks policy changes, damages and attorney fees, the Gazette reported.
"I'm hoping that they'll either change their policies so it doesn't happen to another family or they'll investigate it better before they take babies from their homes," Mort told the newspaper.
Officials with Jameson Hospital's North Campus have not yet commented on the case. According to the Gazette, county representatives said they acted appropriately.
Original Link- http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/pennsylvania-woman-poppy-seeds-not-drugs-led-to-losing-child/19711181?icid=main%7Chtmlws-main-w%7Cdl1%7Csec1_lnk3%7C183489
Sixty Nine Children Rescued During Operation Cross Country V
Washington, D.C. November 08, 2010
Over the past 72 hours, the FBI, its local and state law enforcement partners, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) concluded Operation Cross Country V, a three-day national enforcement action as part of the Innocence Lost National Initiative. The operation included enforcement actions in 40 cities across 34 FBI divisions around the country and led to the recovery of 69 children who were being victimized through prostitution. Additionally, nearly 885 others, including 99 pimps, were arrested on state and local charges.
“Child prostitution continues to be a significant problem in our country, as evidenced by the number of children rescued through the continued efforts of our crimes against children task forces,” said Shawn Henry, executive assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch. “There is no work more important than protecting America’s children and freeing them from the cycle of victimization. Through our strategic partnerships with state and local law enforcement agencies, we are able to make a difference.”
Task Force operations usually begin as local actions, targeting such places as truck stops, casinos, street “tracks,” and Internet websites, based on intelligence gathered by officers working in their respective jurisdictions. Initial arrests are often violations of local and state laws relating to prostitution or solicitation. Information gleaned from those arrested often uncovers organized efforts to prostitute women and children across many states. FBI agents further develop this information in partnership with U.S. Attorney’s Offices and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS) and file federal charges where appropriate.
To date, the 39 Innocence Lost Task Forces and Working Groups have recovered over 1,200 children from the streets. The investigations and subsequent 625 convictions have resulted in lengthy sentences, including multiple 25-years-to-life sentences and the seizure of more than $3.1 million in assets.
In the spring of 2003, the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division, in partnership with the Department of Justice’s CEOS and NCMEC, formed the Innocence Lost National Initiative to address the growing problem of children forced into prostitution.
“The leadership of the FBI and the Justice Department in attacking domestic child trafficking and prostitution is historic,” said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “Once again, Operation Cross Country has awakened the nation to the fact that today, American children are being marketed and sold for sex in American cities. These kids are victims. This is 21st century slavery. We are proud to be a part of this extraordinary partnership to rescue children, save lives, and bring the pimps and operators to justice.”
This program brings state and federal law enforcement agencies, prosecutors, and social service providers all from around the country to NCMEC, where the groups are trained together. In addition, CEOS has reinforced the training by assigning prosecutors to help bring cases in those cities plagued by child prostitution.
The FBI thanks the over 2,100 local, state, and federal law enforcement officers representing 186 separate agencies who participated in Operation Cross Country and ongoing enforcement efforts.
The charges announced today are merely accusations, and all defendants are presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty in a court of law.
For more information on Operation Cross Country and the Innocence Lost National Initiative, visit www.fbi.gov, www.justice.gov, or www.ncmec.org.
Original Link-
http://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/occv_110810
Over the past 72 hours, the FBI, its local and state law enforcement partners, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) concluded Operation Cross Country V, a three-day national enforcement action as part of the Innocence Lost National Initiative. The operation included enforcement actions in 40 cities across 34 FBI divisions around the country and led to the recovery of 69 children who were being victimized through prostitution. Additionally, nearly 885 others, including 99 pimps, were arrested on state and local charges.
“Child prostitution continues to be a significant problem in our country, as evidenced by the number of children rescued through the continued efforts of our crimes against children task forces,” said Shawn Henry, executive assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch. “There is no work more important than protecting America’s children and freeing them from the cycle of victimization. Through our strategic partnerships with state and local law enforcement agencies, we are able to make a difference.”
Task Force operations usually begin as local actions, targeting such places as truck stops, casinos, street “tracks,” and Internet websites, based on intelligence gathered by officers working in their respective jurisdictions. Initial arrests are often violations of local and state laws relating to prostitution or solicitation. Information gleaned from those arrested often uncovers organized efforts to prostitute women and children across many states. FBI agents further develop this information in partnership with U.S. Attorney’s Offices and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS) and file federal charges where appropriate.
To date, the 39 Innocence Lost Task Forces and Working Groups have recovered over 1,200 children from the streets. The investigations and subsequent 625 convictions have resulted in lengthy sentences, including multiple 25-years-to-life sentences and the seizure of more than $3.1 million in assets.
In the spring of 2003, the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division, in partnership with the Department of Justice’s CEOS and NCMEC, formed the Innocence Lost National Initiative to address the growing problem of children forced into prostitution.
“The leadership of the FBI and the Justice Department in attacking domestic child trafficking and prostitution is historic,” said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “Once again, Operation Cross Country has awakened the nation to the fact that today, American children are being marketed and sold for sex in American cities. These kids are victims. This is 21st century slavery. We are proud to be a part of this extraordinary partnership to rescue children, save lives, and bring the pimps and operators to justice.”
This program brings state and federal law enforcement agencies, prosecutors, and social service providers all from around the country to NCMEC, where the groups are trained together. In addition, CEOS has reinforced the training by assigning prosecutors to help bring cases in those cities plagued by child prostitution.
The FBI thanks the over 2,100 local, state, and federal law enforcement officers representing 186 separate agencies who participated in Operation Cross Country and ongoing enforcement efforts.
The charges announced today are merely accusations, and all defendants are presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty in a court of law.
For more information on Operation Cross Country and the Innocence Lost National Initiative, visit www.fbi.gov, www.justice.gov, or www.ncmec.org.
Original Link-
http://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/occv_110810
D.C. settles for $10 million in foster care abuse case
By Henri E. Cauvin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 8, 2010; 11:43 PM
An abusive foster mother nearly cost Rafael Pearson his life, and now the District has agreed to pay $10 million for placing him with the troubled woman, whose beatings left the boy with massive brain damage.
Rafael was just a few days old when he was taken from his drug-addicted mother and placed in the foster home in fall 2005. Beaten and shaken by his foster mother, the baby suffered catastrophic brain damage. He was on life support for days, not expected to survive. More than five years later, he remains profoundly disabled. He can sense light and shadows and movement but otherwise his vision is extremely limited.
The settlement, to be paid out in three installments, beginning with a $5 million payment this month, is one of the largest the District has ever agreed to.
But with a lifetime of round-the-clock care ahead of Rafael, the settlement is hardly a windfall, his attorneys say - the agreement is structured to ensure that Rafael's needs are funded for as long as he lives.
The lawsuit, filed in 2007 after the foster mother, Tanya Jenkins, was tried and sentenced to 12 years for cruelty to children, sought $50 million from the District. The suit was about to go to trial in early August in D.C. Superior Court when the parties indicated that they were closing in on a settlement.
Over the next three months, the agreement took shape, and late Friday, after a few final tweaks, the judge in the case, Judith N. Macaluso, approved the pact.
Sitting in the first row of Courtroom 415, in his tiny white Nikes and his black reclining wheelchair, was Rafael. He occasionally uttered sounds, but he cannot speak. Next to him was his grandmother, Sylvia Pearson, 57, who filed the lawsuit on his behalf and who has been his champion since the day in late October 2005 when it looked like Rafael would not survive.
"You can't replace what would have been a great, normal life," Pearson said after the hearing, "but I have faith in him and his ability to progress more rapidly than people expect."
Already, Raffy, as his grandmother calls him, has defied expectations. He made it out of Children's Hospital. He made it out of the Hospital for Sick Children. And by early next year, he is expected to leave the nursing home in Dunn Loring where he has lived for the past five years.
If all goes according to plan, Raffy will move into his grandmother's Fairfax Station home, which is being fitted with an elevator and other accommodations, and where he will have a home health aide around the clock.
It could, of course, have been worse. But it also could have been altogether different for Raffy, born Sept. 9, 2005, in a motel in Northern Virginia.
When his mother, Renee Pearson, brought him to Virginia Hospital Center later that day, he was 5 pounds 14 ounces and had traces of cocaine in his system. Concerned, the hospital called child welfare officials in the District, where Renee Pearson said she lived. The social worker couldn't verify the the mother's address in Northwest Washington and called the baby's grandmother.
Sylvia Pearson, who had watched her daughter succumb to drugs and the streets, told the social worker to take the baby. Pearson had already adopted one of her daughter's children, and her son had adopted the other. Now, they would have to find a way to help Raffy, who was going to stay in foster care while everything was sorted out.
He ended up with Tanya Jenkins, a new foster parent who was unemployed and lived in Southeast Washington with her 2-year-old son and her boyfriend. Earlier that year, another infant had been placed with Jenkins, but she had sent the child back after five weeks, saying she had health problems that made it difficult to care for the small child.
Despite the red flag, the Child and Family Services Agency came to Jenkins five months later when they needed a home for Raffy. Jenkins agreed but said she didn't have the money to care for the child and would need CFSA to rush the assistance that is routinely provided to help with costs such as additional food.
But even without the additional child, she was struggling, according to testimony at her trial. She told a neighbor that the financial assistance from the District would keep her from being evicted.
Once Raffy arrived, the stress mounted for Jenkins, according to the neighbor, who testified that Jenkins was complaining about never sleeping. Meanwhile, the city's long-troubled child welfare agency wasn't keeping tabs on Jenkins or the baby who had been entrusted to her. A social worker should have visited every week for the first eight weeks. The agency made one visit during the 43 days Raffy was in the home.
It was another harrowing episode in the annals of the District's beleaguered child welfare system, and when they filed suit, Pearson's attorneys, Sidney Schupak and Michelle A. Parfitt of Ashcraft & Gerel, planned to put the entire system on trial.
Instead, the District agreed to pay one of the largest settlements in its history, as well as $2 million in attorneys' fees.
Robert J. Spagnoletti, who was the District's attorney general under Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D), said a settlement as large as the one in this case had never crossed his desk. "It's a very big settlement," but not necessarily unreasonable, said Spagnoletti, now a partner at Schertler & Onorato.
Patrick M. Regan, a leading plaintiffs attorney in the District, called the settlement a "significant" sum of money, but said the amount had to be viewed in the context of the needs the child and his family will face over a lifetime. "It's fair," Regan said.
D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles, who was involved in the settlement negotiations, did not return a call today seeking comment.
Original Link-
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/08/AR2010110805565_2.html?sid=ST2010110806347
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 8, 2010; 11:43 PM
An abusive foster mother nearly cost Rafael Pearson his life, and now the District has agreed to pay $10 million for placing him with the troubled woman, whose beatings left the boy with massive brain damage.
Rafael was just a few days old when he was taken from his drug-addicted mother and placed in the foster home in fall 2005. Beaten and shaken by his foster mother, the baby suffered catastrophic brain damage. He was on life support for days, not expected to survive. More than five years later, he remains profoundly disabled. He can sense light and shadows and movement but otherwise his vision is extremely limited.
The settlement, to be paid out in three installments, beginning with a $5 million payment this month, is one of the largest the District has ever agreed to.
But with a lifetime of round-the-clock care ahead of Rafael, the settlement is hardly a windfall, his attorneys say - the agreement is structured to ensure that Rafael's needs are funded for as long as he lives.
The lawsuit, filed in 2007 after the foster mother, Tanya Jenkins, was tried and sentenced to 12 years for cruelty to children, sought $50 million from the District. The suit was about to go to trial in early August in D.C. Superior Court when the parties indicated that they were closing in on a settlement.
Over the next three months, the agreement took shape, and late Friday, after a few final tweaks, the judge in the case, Judith N. Macaluso, approved the pact.
Sitting in the first row of Courtroom 415, in his tiny white Nikes and his black reclining wheelchair, was Rafael. He occasionally uttered sounds, but he cannot speak. Next to him was his grandmother, Sylvia Pearson, 57, who filed the lawsuit on his behalf and who has been his champion since the day in late October 2005 when it looked like Rafael would not survive.
"You can't replace what would have been a great, normal life," Pearson said after the hearing, "but I have faith in him and his ability to progress more rapidly than people expect."
Already, Raffy, as his grandmother calls him, has defied expectations. He made it out of Children's Hospital. He made it out of the Hospital for Sick Children. And by early next year, he is expected to leave the nursing home in Dunn Loring where he has lived for the past five years.
If all goes according to plan, Raffy will move into his grandmother's Fairfax Station home, which is being fitted with an elevator and other accommodations, and where he will have a home health aide around the clock.
It could, of course, have been worse. But it also could have been altogether different for Raffy, born Sept. 9, 2005, in a motel in Northern Virginia.
When his mother, Renee Pearson, brought him to Virginia Hospital Center later that day, he was 5 pounds 14 ounces and had traces of cocaine in his system. Concerned, the hospital called child welfare officials in the District, where Renee Pearson said she lived. The social worker couldn't verify the the mother's address in Northwest Washington and called the baby's grandmother.
Sylvia Pearson, who had watched her daughter succumb to drugs and the streets, told the social worker to take the baby. Pearson had already adopted one of her daughter's children, and her son had adopted the other. Now, they would have to find a way to help Raffy, who was going to stay in foster care while everything was sorted out.
He ended up with Tanya Jenkins, a new foster parent who was unemployed and lived in Southeast Washington with her 2-year-old son and her boyfriend. Earlier that year, another infant had been placed with Jenkins, but she had sent the child back after five weeks, saying she had health problems that made it difficult to care for the small child.
Despite the red flag, the Child and Family Services Agency came to Jenkins five months later when they needed a home for Raffy. Jenkins agreed but said she didn't have the money to care for the child and would need CFSA to rush the assistance that is routinely provided to help with costs such as additional food.
But even without the additional child, she was struggling, according to testimony at her trial. She told a neighbor that the financial assistance from the District would keep her from being evicted.
Once Raffy arrived, the stress mounted for Jenkins, according to the neighbor, who testified that Jenkins was complaining about never sleeping. Meanwhile, the city's long-troubled child welfare agency wasn't keeping tabs on Jenkins or the baby who had been entrusted to her. A social worker should have visited every week for the first eight weeks. The agency made one visit during the 43 days Raffy was in the home.
It was another harrowing episode in the annals of the District's beleaguered child welfare system, and when they filed suit, Pearson's attorneys, Sidney Schupak and Michelle A. Parfitt of Ashcraft & Gerel, planned to put the entire system on trial.
Instead, the District agreed to pay one of the largest settlements in its history, as well as $2 million in attorneys' fees.
Robert J. Spagnoletti, who was the District's attorney general under Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D), said a settlement as large as the one in this case had never crossed his desk. "It's a very big settlement," but not necessarily unreasonable, said Spagnoletti, now a partner at Schertler & Onorato.
Patrick M. Regan, a leading plaintiffs attorney in the District, called the settlement a "significant" sum of money, but said the amount had to be viewed in the context of the needs the child and his family will face over a lifetime. "It's fair," Regan said.
D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles, who was involved in the settlement negotiations, did not return a call today seeking comment.
Original Link-
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/08/AR2010110805565_2.html?sid=ST2010110806347
Monday, November 8, 2010
Personality Disordered Abusers in Family Law Courts
I found this article this morning and had to share..
William Eddy is an attorney and licensed clinical social worker who has written many excellent books on personality disorders and how they manifest in family law battles. In his recent books, he has taken to calling people with personality disorders who engage in extensive and unreasonable litigation as High Conflict Personalities (HCP). He’s stated that a large part, possibly as much as 40%, of the litigation in family courts involves HCPs.
Yet despite the prevalence of these psychological problems in family law courts, judges often fail to understand the problems and are prone to reward the abusers for their conduct. This is likely to intensify the abuses because they have been positively reinforced with rewards such as sole physical and/or legal custody, financial awards, or simply emotional satisfaction of seeing the hated target being berated by a judge the abuser manipulated.
While HCP is a great term in many ways, it does not convey how abusively many of these people act particularly towards others in their families or former families. I’ve taken to using the term Personality Disordered Abuser, PDA for short, to refer to these people. Like many personality disorder victims, they are generally victims of child abuse. More importantly, they are abusers themselves. They often abuse children, spouses, ex-spouses, and other current or former family members.
Please keep in mind that not all Axis II personality disorder victims are PDAs. For instance, there is a large subset of people with Borderline Personality Disorder who engage in “acting in” behaviors which primarily hurt themselves. These people are the ones who cut and mutilate themselves, abuse drugs, engage in reckless and dangerous behaviors that primarily risk their own well-being, and often attempt suicide. While this may cause a substantial amount of emotional harm to the people around them, they are often not intending or plotting to harm others.
This is significantly different from the PDAs who generally have goals to cause harm to others. They use manipulation and abuse to control people and situations to get what they want. PDAs as a group engage in systematic “acting out” behaviors targeted against others.
Note that it is entirely possible for a person to engage in both acting in and acting out behaviors. However, usually if you look at the whole scope and pattern of behaviors you will see they primarily engage in one or the other. A person who primarily engages in unprotected sex, abuses alcohol and drugs, and has repeatedly attempted suicide but is known to infrequently hit another person while intoxicated is probably not a PDA. PDAs are much more intensively focused on causing harm to others than this example.
PDAs Hurt Targets for Own Benefits
A Borderline who “acts in” may succeed at killing herself or himself by many means, including accidental drug overdoses, car accidents due to reckless driving, or intentional suicide. PDAs “acting out”, on the other hand, are far less likely to hurt themselves this way as they avoid self-harm and are instead intent on severely damaging a select group of people around them. Those people often include their children, siblings, and current or former spouses, significant others, or close friends.
PDAs often benefit from their abusive behaviors. This is particularly the case if they are highly intelligent and skilled at manipulation.
PDAs are often able to “push the buttons” of their abuse targets, provoking them by using repeated threats, crimes, and other attacks. When the abuse targets finally respond to the continuing and possibly escalating attacks, they often do so out of desperation to make them stop. They are often in fear for their own safety or well-being or that of their children and loved ones. Then the PDAs are often able to deceive others into thinking that they are merely victims of some hostile crazy abusive person when in fact they are the abusers. They thereby further intensify their control and escalate the damage they are able to inflict upon their targets.
Personality Disordered Abuser Behavior Patterns
Many of us who have endured the ravages of a marriage and family law battle with a PDA can recite example after example of their abusive and bizarre behaviors going back many years, even decades. Sometimes we are even aware of their similar conduct with their birth families, but may have learned of it far too late to prevent major damage to our children and ourselves.
We have experienced their rages, screaming, and berating for no apparent reason, only to see them change their mood moments later acting as if they had done nothing hostile. Then they act as if we are the problems when we are not friendly towards them after being repeatedly attacked.
We have endured their constant threats, provocations, and refusal to cooperate with reason, fairness, common sense, and court orders that typify the unrelenting efforts of the PDA to control everybody and everything around them. At times we may be in fear for our lives from these people, but because they are very good at controlling their own behaviors to appear reasonable around most people, few can understand how truly dangerous they are.
We have suffered their vilification and distortion campaigns that spread into our children’s schools, doctor’s offices, workplaces, and to friends and family. Often only years after it started, we find that we have been described as vile, hateful, dangerous people to hundreds or thousands of people around us who have never even met us but believe all these lies because they have heard them unchallenged for so long. We have been overwhelmed by how dozens or even hundreds of people hate and malign us because they are too uneducated in psychology and easily duped and controlled by the PDA.
Gathering Minions for Attacking the Target
One of the methods PDAs use is to build a support system they can use to attack their targets. This is easiest to do with ex-spouses or former boyfriends or girlfriends, but sometimes can be used to attack children, siblings, parents, and others.
PDAs learn to identify weak-minded people as potential recruits for their distortion campaigns. These people are often very gullible do-gooders poorly educated in psychology. Occasionally they may be mentally impaired themselves, but even when that is the case it is only sometimes severe. They may be thinking they are somehow doing good by helping to attack the target. In fact they have been subverted into destructive behaviors by a masterfully manipulative abuser who deceives them and prevents them from discovering the facts.
PDAs sometimes are able to find other PDAs to ally with them. For instance, a PDA who had an affair with another PDA may recruit the person to assist them with attacking a spouse or former spouse. Elevated levels of criminality can be achieved while maintaining plausible deniability for the instigating PDA. She may be able to convince her personality disordered lover to stalk her ex-spouse, hack his email, and even physically attack him. While she is the instigator and it is a conspiracy of harassment, the broken family law courts will probably let her off with no consequences for the crimes she caused.
Building False Reality from Partial Truths and Lies
PDAs are especially good at sprinkling in enough plausible or partial truths amidst the outright lies and twisted distortions to convince the uneducated and ignorant people around them to accept their version of reality. They will often produce “proof” of their overall story in the form of other people repeating their claims, writings or notes that look hostile or unreasonable, or altered or abridged documents that may be very official-looking and convince the majority of people who have never seen a police report, court declaration, court transcript, or other such government document. That these documents are not complete nor accurate is often entirely outside the awareness of the people being manipulated in this fashion.
When one is being defamed and attacked relentlessly, it is only natural to want to defend one’s reputation. However, even this can be twisted by the PDA to cause more damage to the target. The attempts by the targets to defend from the PDA’s onslaught, hold her or him accountable for the abuse, and to get her or him the help needed to learn to stop these behaviors often backfire. This is especially the case in family law courts as judges are woefully untrained in psychology and rely upon custody evaluators who are usually incapable or unwilling to do what is needed to protect the victims from the abusers. They are also often highly unwilling to consider testimony of people who witnessed events and saw and/or heard what the PDA said. Such accounts often sound bizarre and therefore are dismissed as hearsay or incredible, even though they are objectively accurate.
Legal Self-Defense Is “Criminalized” By Family Law Courts
It is natural to want to defend one’s freedom and reputation from these assaults by a PDA. Some may also want to help people understand what has gone wrong, stop the spread of defamation, and help the family get needed help, all of which in theory should be easier to accomplish if people could name and discuss what has gone wrong with the out of control false accuser.
If the victim of false accusations responds by disclosing the false accuser’s behaviors and applies a personality disorder name to explain why she or he is behaving this way, that is often regarded as a very serious offense by the courts.
Blatant disregard for freedom of speech is commonly shown by family law judges. PDAs are routinely given free reign to defame their victims and to recruit allies to attack them. If the victim of this defamation writes about what the PDA has done in a blog, discussion group, or email to get help or defend against the defamation, incompetent or corrupt family law judges will use that as reason to reduce child custody, denigrate the victim, and make financially punitive rulings.
Family law judges do not like freedom of speech. Perhaps that is because they realize that if the public truly knew the crimes and offenses they routinely commit against children and good parents that they would be removed from office or prosecuted. So it appears that one of the foremost goals of many poor family law judges is to shut up the litigants by use of intimidation, threats, and illegal orders. For a PDA, this is no problem because the PDA is used to spreading defamation without being discovered. Targets, however, are not used to this and may find that they have just been told by an idiot judge that they should just sit back and watch their reputations be trashed and if they do anything to stop if that they will never see their children again.
The courts often rule that defending one’s freedom and reputation from the PDA by writing, speaking, or other public disclosure, or even such disclosure just to family members, is a form of harassment and it will be punished. But these same courts will do nothing to punish the PDA for engaging in false criminal allegations, defamation, and harassment in the first place. This destructive double standard is precisely what is being practiced by many judges in many family law cases all across the United States.
Courts also often side against a party who has been abused by the court when that party publicly points out the abuses committed by the court. Personality disordered abusers are often very successful at getting what they want because they build armies army of minions to attack the ex by various legal and illegal means. These parties too often include the judge in the case.
While it is clear the interests of justice are not being served by such judges and they should recuse or even resign their office given an obvious lack of objectivity, criticizing the judicial bias and misconduct risks even more judicial harassment in response. But saying nothing simply lets such judges continue their misconduct.
It is a common observation from people in cases involving a PDA that many family law judges are against free speech and will punish a parent and harm their children in retaliation. This willingness to persecute people and abuse their children for speaking up about the conduct of family law judges appears to be intended to forcibly suppress any negative publicity about bad judges and how they reward false allegations and other tactics that PDAs use with great frequency.
Gender Does Affect Risk from PDAs
The people at most risk of permanently life-altering harm are male targets of female PDAs. That is partly because of the gross misconceptions popular with the public about men being abusers and women being victims and partly because of sexist judges and laws.
While gender inequality is a huge problem in this area and men are more often than not the victims, female targets can easily have their lives ruined by male PDAs, too. This is especially the case when the male PDA is viewed as having special credibility such as working as a doctor, lawyer, minister, or other occupation which the public mistakenly believes is highly unlikely to allow abusers into its ranks.
Don’t Depend Upon Any Protection from Courts
The bottom line is that if you are a target of a PDA, you cannot count on any protection whatsoever from today’s family law courts. If you try to protect yourself, you will probably be persecuted for it. You are in a lose-lose situation because the abuser is likely to be assisted and rewarded by incompetent and/or sexist judges and foolishly destructive and/or sexist laws.
Possibly your only sure means to safety when being abused by a PDA is to disappear. The PDA may continue to attack you for some time, but if you are nowhere to be found and nobody who hears the defamation against you sees you again, it may have little if any lasting effect upon you.
While disappearing is feasible for people with no children, those who have children usually do not have such an option. They are stuck between only a few legal choices, all of which are horrible. These include abandoning their children for their own safety, staying and living with the ongoing abuse of the PDA against the children and themselves and possibly their extended families, trying to defend themselves in court which is virtually a guarantee of financial devastation, or trying to defend themselves outside of court which will almost certainly be spun by the PDA to get them into trouble with police, CPS, and courts. Meanwhile, the PDA keeps right on with the abuse.
Family Law Courts Perpetuate Child and Spousal Abuse by PDAs
Far too many of today’s family law judges lack any significant training or education in psychology and further lack personal experience being abused by a person afflicted with a personality disorder. Such judges are very likely to do exactly the wrong thing in many cases. These judges get bad data and act on it as if it is true. Even when it is pointed out to them exactly how it is wrong by a psychological evaluator or a party citing objective and accurate evidence, they often will not believe it because they cannot comprehend how powerfully effective the manipulations of the PDA are and therefore believe the PDA’s target is mistaken or dishonest and the evaluator was too easy on him or her.
William Eddy and others like him have been trying to educate judges and others in the legal profession about these problems. Sadly, these efforts are far too little to fix the problems even in areas where Eddy has done many presentations and training sessions.
One of these areas is San Diego County, California, where Eddy lives and works much of the time. A psychological evaluator from that region with whom I’ve spoken has stated that the family law courts there are “the most broken they have been in [the evaluator's] three decades” of involvement with the courts and CPS on behalf of children. The region’s courts are direct contributors to serious harm against children and families. This is especially alarming when well-intentioned activitists such as Eddy have spent years trying to educate the county’s judges on personality disorders and how they affect family law cases. It calls into serious question whether family law courts can ever be repaired to function effectively and justly.
Given their dereliction of duty, egregious incompetence, and frequent bias, many family law courts have no business being involved in family disputes involving allegations of abuse or mental illness. They only intensity conflicts, increase abuses, and worsen the harm done to all parties except for possibly the abusers they assist and reward. However, even the abusers are suffering because these broken courts enable them to continue their abuses rather than get on the road the psychological recovery.
I strongly believe that family law courts in the United States today as a general rule are incapable of effectively, fairly, and timely hearing cases involving PDAs.
The judges who are assigned family law duties are often newbies with zero experience in family law courts and no training in psychology. Yet they are being asked to figure out the truth in matters with people who are expert liars and are fully capable of making many other people believe their lies and repeat them. The methods they are using includes very weak evidentiary standards and allowing family law courts to be used as kangaroo courts for criminal prosecutions that would obviously fail for lack of evidence in a real criminal court. They are also willing to drag out no-contact and supervised visitation periods against falsely accused people for months or years with little to no evidence to support such actions. Sometime the evidence that supports there being no basis for a safety concern is even hidden by CPS and the children’s attorney, if there is one, for years until it is finally “discovered”.
The result of these broken courts is that children and families are frequently harmed. It is extremely easy for a skilled manipulator to lie and deceive, stage attacks to generate “evidence” that the victim is the abuser, cause the courts to become allies in the abuse, and to jerk around the evaluators, courts, and entire system to delay cases for years while they build their armies of hate and establish a “parenting track record” that the idiot judges in the broken family law courts will interpret as meaning they are capable parents (when in fact they are often highly abusive to the children, frequently by parental alienation and other forms of emotional abuse) and the target parents are irrelevant because they have had little contact with their children for years.
Reforming Broken Family Law Courts Proves Difficult
Many target parents end up with little or no contact with their children for years, are financially ruined, have difficulty working or functioning well after the abuses they have endured, and are sometimes even incarcerated for crimes they did not commit or “fake crimes” caused by temporary restraining orders that turned normal things like calling one’s children into crimes that can result in jail time. These are not isolated miscarriages of justice, they are common and are occurring to likely millions of parents, many of whom are so beaten up and devastated that they simply leave. Many of them end up being derided as “absent fathers” or “deadbeat dads” who lost their children, livelihoods, freedom, and health at the hands of abusive personality disordered females and broken family law courts.
Resolving these problems is very difficult because the public has little to no understanding of how many innocent good parents are being caught up in and ruined by this broken system until it happens to them. Then these fresh victims are usually stigmatized as child abusers, spousal beaters, convicted criminals, and/or deadbeats who don’t pay child support. (Note that “deadbeat” can apply to both genders of parents and that some statistics show a slightly higher percentage of mothers than fathers fail to pay child support.) Almost nobody who has not been similarly abused will listen to them. They and their children are the victims of the family law courts even more than they are the victims of the personality disordered abusers in their lives. The PDA could cause great harm, but the courts made that harm more or less permanent.
While I have emphasized how men are at increased risk from personality disordered abusers and their manipulations of family law systems, these abuses are happening to many women, too. This is not a gender issue so much as it is an issue of violation of civil and constitution rights, broken courts, and public apathy about a major crisis afflicting millions of Americans. The people who gain advantage from this broken system who consider their own financial security paramount over the well-being of children and families don’t want it fixed and often try to portray the problem as a gender issue to balkanize the public and impede reform attempts. There are certainly judges, attorneys, and psychologists who are disgusted with the system the way it is today, but they seem to be few and far between. Most of them are apathetic, as if they forgot the ideas of public service and helping people that might have once motivated them at the beginning of their careers.
Original Article-
http://angiemedia.com/2010/03/29/personality-disorder-abusers-in-family-law-courts/
William Eddy is an attorney and licensed clinical social worker who has written many excellent books on personality disorders and how they manifest in family law battles. In his recent books, he has taken to calling people with personality disorders who engage in extensive and unreasonable litigation as High Conflict Personalities (HCP). He’s stated that a large part, possibly as much as 40%, of the litigation in family courts involves HCPs.
Yet despite the prevalence of these psychological problems in family law courts, judges often fail to understand the problems and are prone to reward the abusers for their conduct. This is likely to intensify the abuses because they have been positively reinforced with rewards such as sole physical and/or legal custody, financial awards, or simply emotional satisfaction of seeing the hated target being berated by a judge the abuser manipulated.
While HCP is a great term in many ways, it does not convey how abusively many of these people act particularly towards others in their families or former families. I’ve taken to using the term Personality Disordered Abuser, PDA for short, to refer to these people. Like many personality disorder victims, they are generally victims of child abuse. More importantly, they are abusers themselves. They often abuse children, spouses, ex-spouses, and other current or former family members.
Please keep in mind that not all Axis II personality disorder victims are PDAs. For instance, there is a large subset of people with Borderline Personality Disorder who engage in “acting in” behaviors which primarily hurt themselves. These people are the ones who cut and mutilate themselves, abuse drugs, engage in reckless and dangerous behaviors that primarily risk their own well-being, and often attempt suicide. While this may cause a substantial amount of emotional harm to the people around them, they are often not intending or plotting to harm others.
This is significantly different from the PDAs who generally have goals to cause harm to others. They use manipulation and abuse to control people and situations to get what they want. PDAs as a group engage in systematic “acting out” behaviors targeted against others.
Note that it is entirely possible for a person to engage in both acting in and acting out behaviors. However, usually if you look at the whole scope and pattern of behaviors you will see they primarily engage in one or the other. A person who primarily engages in unprotected sex, abuses alcohol and drugs, and has repeatedly attempted suicide but is known to infrequently hit another person while intoxicated is probably not a PDA. PDAs are much more intensively focused on causing harm to others than this example.
PDAs Hurt Targets for Own Benefits
A Borderline who “acts in” may succeed at killing herself or himself by many means, including accidental drug overdoses, car accidents due to reckless driving, or intentional suicide. PDAs “acting out”, on the other hand, are far less likely to hurt themselves this way as they avoid self-harm and are instead intent on severely damaging a select group of people around them. Those people often include their children, siblings, and current or former spouses, significant others, or close friends.
PDAs often benefit from their abusive behaviors. This is particularly the case if they are highly intelligent and skilled at manipulation.
PDAs are often able to “push the buttons” of their abuse targets, provoking them by using repeated threats, crimes, and other attacks. When the abuse targets finally respond to the continuing and possibly escalating attacks, they often do so out of desperation to make them stop. They are often in fear for their own safety or well-being or that of their children and loved ones. Then the PDAs are often able to deceive others into thinking that they are merely victims of some hostile crazy abusive person when in fact they are the abusers. They thereby further intensify their control and escalate the damage they are able to inflict upon their targets.
Personality Disordered Abuser Behavior Patterns
Many of us who have endured the ravages of a marriage and family law battle with a PDA can recite example after example of their abusive and bizarre behaviors going back many years, even decades. Sometimes we are even aware of their similar conduct with their birth families, but may have learned of it far too late to prevent major damage to our children and ourselves.
We have experienced their rages, screaming, and berating for no apparent reason, only to see them change their mood moments later acting as if they had done nothing hostile. Then they act as if we are the problems when we are not friendly towards them after being repeatedly attacked.
We have endured their constant threats, provocations, and refusal to cooperate with reason, fairness, common sense, and court orders that typify the unrelenting efforts of the PDA to control everybody and everything around them. At times we may be in fear for our lives from these people, but because they are very good at controlling their own behaviors to appear reasonable around most people, few can understand how truly dangerous they are.
We have suffered their vilification and distortion campaigns that spread into our children’s schools, doctor’s offices, workplaces, and to friends and family. Often only years after it started, we find that we have been described as vile, hateful, dangerous people to hundreds or thousands of people around us who have never even met us but believe all these lies because they have heard them unchallenged for so long. We have been overwhelmed by how dozens or even hundreds of people hate and malign us because they are too uneducated in psychology and easily duped and controlled by the PDA.
Gathering Minions for Attacking the Target
One of the methods PDAs use is to build a support system they can use to attack their targets. This is easiest to do with ex-spouses or former boyfriends or girlfriends, but sometimes can be used to attack children, siblings, parents, and others.
PDAs learn to identify weak-minded people as potential recruits for their distortion campaigns. These people are often very gullible do-gooders poorly educated in psychology. Occasionally they may be mentally impaired themselves, but even when that is the case it is only sometimes severe. They may be thinking they are somehow doing good by helping to attack the target. In fact they have been subverted into destructive behaviors by a masterfully manipulative abuser who deceives them and prevents them from discovering the facts.
PDAs sometimes are able to find other PDAs to ally with them. For instance, a PDA who had an affair with another PDA may recruit the person to assist them with attacking a spouse or former spouse. Elevated levels of criminality can be achieved while maintaining plausible deniability for the instigating PDA. She may be able to convince her personality disordered lover to stalk her ex-spouse, hack his email, and even physically attack him. While she is the instigator and it is a conspiracy of harassment, the broken family law courts will probably let her off with no consequences for the crimes she caused.
Building False Reality from Partial Truths and Lies
PDAs are especially good at sprinkling in enough plausible or partial truths amidst the outright lies and twisted distortions to convince the uneducated and ignorant people around them to accept their version of reality. They will often produce “proof” of their overall story in the form of other people repeating their claims, writings or notes that look hostile or unreasonable, or altered or abridged documents that may be very official-looking and convince the majority of people who have never seen a police report, court declaration, court transcript, or other such government document. That these documents are not complete nor accurate is often entirely outside the awareness of the people being manipulated in this fashion.
When one is being defamed and attacked relentlessly, it is only natural to want to defend one’s reputation. However, even this can be twisted by the PDA to cause more damage to the target. The attempts by the targets to defend from the PDA’s onslaught, hold her or him accountable for the abuse, and to get her or him the help needed to learn to stop these behaviors often backfire. This is especially the case in family law courts as judges are woefully untrained in psychology and rely upon custody evaluators who are usually incapable or unwilling to do what is needed to protect the victims from the abusers. They are also often highly unwilling to consider testimony of people who witnessed events and saw and/or heard what the PDA said. Such accounts often sound bizarre and therefore are dismissed as hearsay or incredible, even though they are objectively accurate.
Legal Self-Defense Is “Criminalized” By Family Law Courts
It is natural to want to defend one’s freedom and reputation from these assaults by a PDA. Some may also want to help people understand what has gone wrong, stop the spread of defamation, and help the family get needed help, all of which in theory should be easier to accomplish if people could name and discuss what has gone wrong with the out of control false accuser.
If the victim of false accusations responds by disclosing the false accuser’s behaviors and applies a personality disorder name to explain why she or he is behaving this way, that is often regarded as a very serious offense by the courts.
Blatant disregard for freedom of speech is commonly shown by family law judges. PDAs are routinely given free reign to defame their victims and to recruit allies to attack them. If the victim of this defamation writes about what the PDA has done in a blog, discussion group, or email to get help or defend against the defamation, incompetent or corrupt family law judges will use that as reason to reduce child custody, denigrate the victim, and make financially punitive rulings.
Family law judges do not like freedom of speech. Perhaps that is because they realize that if the public truly knew the crimes and offenses they routinely commit against children and good parents that they would be removed from office or prosecuted. So it appears that one of the foremost goals of many poor family law judges is to shut up the litigants by use of intimidation, threats, and illegal orders. For a PDA, this is no problem because the PDA is used to spreading defamation without being discovered. Targets, however, are not used to this and may find that they have just been told by an idiot judge that they should just sit back and watch their reputations be trashed and if they do anything to stop if that they will never see their children again.
The courts often rule that defending one’s freedom and reputation from the PDA by writing, speaking, or other public disclosure, or even such disclosure just to family members, is a form of harassment and it will be punished. But these same courts will do nothing to punish the PDA for engaging in false criminal allegations, defamation, and harassment in the first place. This destructive double standard is precisely what is being practiced by many judges in many family law cases all across the United States.
Courts also often side against a party who has been abused by the court when that party publicly points out the abuses committed by the court. Personality disordered abusers are often very successful at getting what they want because they build armies army of minions to attack the ex by various legal and illegal means. These parties too often include the judge in the case.
While it is clear the interests of justice are not being served by such judges and they should recuse or even resign their office given an obvious lack of objectivity, criticizing the judicial bias and misconduct risks even more judicial harassment in response. But saying nothing simply lets such judges continue their misconduct.
It is a common observation from people in cases involving a PDA that many family law judges are against free speech and will punish a parent and harm their children in retaliation. This willingness to persecute people and abuse their children for speaking up about the conduct of family law judges appears to be intended to forcibly suppress any negative publicity about bad judges and how they reward false allegations and other tactics that PDAs use with great frequency.
Gender Does Affect Risk from PDAs
The people at most risk of permanently life-altering harm are male targets of female PDAs. That is partly because of the gross misconceptions popular with the public about men being abusers and women being victims and partly because of sexist judges and laws.
While gender inequality is a huge problem in this area and men are more often than not the victims, female targets can easily have their lives ruined by male PDAs, too. This is especially the case when the male PDA is viewed as having special credibility such as working as a doctor, lawyer, minister, or other occupation which the public mistakenly believes is highly unlikely to allow abusers into its ranks.
Don’t Depend Upon Any Protection from Courts
The bottom line is that if you are a target of a PDA, you cannot count on any protection whatsoever from today’s family law courts. If you try to protect yourself, you will probably be persecuted for it. You are in a lose-lose situation because the abuser is likely to be assisted and rewarded by incompetent and/or sexist judges and foolishly destructive and/or sexist laws.
Possibly your only sure means to safety when being abused by a PDA is to disappear. The PDA may continue to attack you for some time, but if you are nowhere to be found and nobody who hears the defamation against you sees you again, it may have little if any lasting effect upon you.
While disappearing is feasible for people with no children, those who have children usually do not have such an option. They are stuck between only a few legal choices, all of which are horrible. These include abandoning their children for their own safety, staying and living with the ongoing abuse of the PDA against the children and themselves and possibly their extended families, trying to defend themselves in court which is virtually a guarantee of financial devastation, or trying to defend themselves outside of court which will almost certainly be spun by the PDA to get them into trouble with police, CPS, and courts. Meanwhile, the PDA keeps right on with the abuse.
Family Law Courts Perpetuate Child and Spousal Abuse by PDAs
Far too many of today’s family law judges lack any significant training or education in psychology and further lack personal experience being abused by a person afflicted with a personality disorder. Such judges are very likely to do exactly the wrong thing in many cases. These judges get bad data and act on it as if it is true. Even when it is pointed out to them exactly how it is wrong by a psychological evaluator or a party citing objective and accurate evidence, they often will not believe it because they cannot comprehend how powerfully effective the manipulations of the PDA are and therefore believe the PDA’s target is mistaken or dishonest and the evaluator was too easy on him or her.
William Eddy and others like him have been trying to educate judges and others in the legal profession about these problems. Sadly, these efforts are far too little to fix the problems even in areas where Eddy has done many presentations and training sessions.
One of these areas is San Diego County, California, where Eddy lives and works much of the time. A psychological evaluator from that region with whom I’ve spoken has stated that the family law courts there are “the most broken they have been in [the evaluator's] three decades” of involvement with the courts and CPS on behalf of children. The region’s courts are direct contributors to serious harm against children and families. This is especially alarming when well-intentioned activitists such as Eddy have spent years trying to educate the county’s judges on personality disorders and how they affect family law cases. It calls into serious question whether family law courts can ever be repaired to function effectively and justly.
Given their dereliction of duty, egregious incompetence, and frequent bias, many family law courts have no business being involved in family disputes involving allegations of abuse or mental illness. They only intensity conflicts, increase abuses, and worsen the harm done to all parties except for possibly the abusers they assist and reward. However, even the abusers are suffering because these broken courts enable them to continue their abuses rather than get on the road the psychological recovery.
I strongly believe that family law courts in the United States today as a general rule are incapable of effectively, fairly, and timely hearing cases involving PDAs.
The judges who are assigned family law duties are often newbies with zero experience in family law courts and no training in psychology. Yet they are being asked to figure out the truth in matters with people who are expert liars and are fully capable of making many other people believe their lies and repeat them. The methods they are using includes very weak evidentiary standards and allowing family law courts to be used as kangaroo courts for criminal prosecutions that would obviously fail for lack of evidence in a real criminal court. They are also willing to drag out no-contact and supervised visitation periods against falsely accused people for months or years with little to no evidence to support such actions. Sometime the evidence that supports there being no basis for a safety concern is even hidden by CPS and the children’s attorney, if there is one, for years until it is finally “discovered”.
The result of these broken courts is that children and families are frequently harmed. It is extremely easy for a skilled manipulator to lie and deceive, stage attacks to generate “evidence” that the victim is the abuser, cause the courts to become allies in the abuse, and to jerk around the evaluators, courts, and entire system to delay cases for years while they build their armies of hate and establish a “parenting track record” that the idiot judges in the broken family law courts will interpret as meaning they are capable parents (when in fact they are often highly abusive to the children, frequently by parental alienation and other forms of emotional abuse) and the target parents are irrelevant because they have had little contact with their children for years.
Reforming Broken Family Law Courts Proves Difficult
Many target parents end up with little or no contact with their children for years, are financially ruined, have difficulty working or functioning well after the abuses they have endured, and are sometimes even incarcerated for crimes they did not commit or “fake crimes” caused by temporary restraining orders that turned normal things like calling one’s children into crimes that can result in jail time. These are not isolated miscarriages of justice, they are common and are occurring to likely millions of parents, many of whom are so beaten up and devastated that they simply leave. Many of them end up being derided as “absent fathers” or “deadbeat dads” who lost their children, livelihoods, freedom, and health at the hands of abusive personality disordered females and broken family law courts.
Resolving these problems is very difficult because the public has little to no understanding of how many innocent good parents are being caught up in and ruined by this broken system until it happens to them. Then these fresh victims are usually stigmatized as child abusers, spousal beaters, convicted criminals, and/or deadbeats who don’t pay child support. (Note that “deadbeat” can apply to both genders of parents and that some statistics show a slightly higher percentage of mothers than fathers fail to pay child support.) Almost nobody who has not been similarly abused will listen to them. They and their children are the victims of the family law courts even more than they are the victims of the personality disordered abusers in their lives. The PDA could cause great harm, but the courts made that harm more or less permanent.
While I have emphasized how men are at increased risk from personality disordered abusers and their manipulations of family law systems, these abuses are happening to many women, too. This is not a gender issue so much as it is an issue of violation of civil and constitution rights, broken courts, and public apathy about a major crisis afflicting millions of Americans. The people who gain advantage from this broken system who consider their own financial security paramount over the well-being of children and families don’t want it fixed and often try to portray the problem as a gender issue to balkanize the public and impede reform attempts. There are certainly judges, attorneys, and psychologists who are disgusted with the system the way it is today, but they seem to be few and far between. Most of them are apathetic, as if they forgot the ideas of public service and helping people that might have once motivated them at the beginning of their careers.
Original Article-
http://angiemedia.com/2010/03/29/personality-disorder-abusers-in-family-law-courts/
Psychiatric Detention of Foster Kids Is Focus of Lawsuit
May 2010--A federal lawsuit alleges that New York City’s child welfare agency commits wayward foster children to psychiatric hospitals and leaves them there long after they are declared fit for release.
The Administration for Children’s Services apparently sends the children to city hospitals for “disciplinary reasons,” rather than medical reasons. Pretexts for being sent to the looney bin including staying out too late, fighting, or “running away.”
As reported in The New York Times on Thursday, May 13, the Legal Aid Society filed its suit Wednesday, May 12, in the United States District Court in Brooklyn, objecting to the practices of committing foster children to psych wards for behavioral reasons, and keeping them inside beyond their recommended discharge dates. The terms of their confinement are apparently unnecessarily restrictive.
While seeking a preliminary injunction releasing three named children and a court order barring placement in hospitals unless medically indicated, Legal Aid is requesting class-action status for the suit. The Times said the lawyers handling the case have identified 24 more questionable detentions.
The Times notes: “There is a high incidence of mental illness among foster-care children, who have been separated from their families, many after suffering physical or sexual abuse.” This is according to Marcia Lowry, executive director of a group called Children’s Rights.
Thank you Rolando, for sharing this..
Original Link - http://www.askdeblasiowhy.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=112:psychiatric-detention&catid=46:news-updates
The Administration for Children’s Services apparently sends the children to city hospitals for “disciplinary reasons,” rather than medical reasons. Pretexts for being sent to the looney bin including staying out too late, fighting, or “running away.”
As reported in The New York Times on Thursday, May 13, the Legal Aid Society filed its suit Wednesday, May 12, in the United States District Court in Brooklyn, objecting to the practices of committing foster children to psych wards for behavioral reasons, and keeping them inside beyond their recommended discharge dates. The terms of their confinement are apparently unnecessarily restrictive.
While seeking a preliminary injunction releasing three named children and a court order barring placement in hospitals unless medically indicated, Legal Aid is requesting class-action status for the suit. The Times said the lawyers handling the case have identified 24 more questionable detentions.
The Times notes: “There is a high incidence of mental illness among foster-care children, who have been separated from their families, many after suffering physical or sexual abuse.” This is according to Marcia Lowry, executive director of a group called Children’s Rights.
Thank you Rolando, for sharing this..
Original Link - http://www.askdeblasiowhy.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=112:psychiatric-detention&catid=46:news-updates
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
