Mother: 'The courts terrified me.'
NWI Times
December 15, 1996
http://www.nwitimes.com/uncategorized/mother-the-courts-terrified-me/article_f1d973eb-66c8-5a02-b614-d265386a1eb5.html
VALPARAISO - It was 6 a.m. on a Sunday in April 1995.
Roused from her sleep, Susan Finley heard knocking on her door. When she opened the door, Finley was so shocked she can't remember today how many police officers came to take her children away.
"They handed me some sort of court order to relinquish my children to them and take them to my ex-in-laws," Finley said. "I wish there could have been another way to take the children. ... To this day, they're scared of police.
"I was shocked until (police) took them out the door," Finley said. "Once the door shut, I thought I was going to die. They were ripping my heart out."
Finley recalls thinking while police were taking her children, ages 5 and 7, out of their beds, "Why are they doing this to me? I'm a good mother."
Finley had not been charged with abuse or neglect.
Court documents show Finley lost custody because she kept her two sick children home instead of sending them off with their father for his scheduled Easter weekend visitation.
With the couple disagreeing about the seriousness of the children's illness, their father, Scott Finley of South Haven, contacted the children's guardian ad litem, Beatrice Lightfoot of Burns Harbor.
Webber's court order removing the children with police and giving temporary custody to Scott Finley's parents was filed in court on a Wednesday without a hearing on the matter. Police took the children on Sunday.
Finley would not regain custody of her children until June 10, although medical affidavits confirmed the children's illness.
Finley says she never did have her day in court on the issue.
Finley today believes the more personal, supportive system offered by family court advocates would have prevented police coming to her door.
State Sen. William Alexa, D-Valparaiso, said he will sponsor a bill to establish three family courts at state expense.
Should the bill pass the legislature, each county's judiciary will have the opportunity to apply for state funds to establish a unified family court system.
Alexa said he believes Porter County to be a good candidate for the project because it is on the cusp of being a medium-sized county. The other two candidates must be rural or urban in demographics.
Unlike Porter County, whose only consolidation of family issues is to assign dissolutions to two magistrates, Lake County already has established a domestic relations bureau, the first step in developing a family court, according to Alexa.
Domestic relations bureaus offer counseling and mediation services. "If something like that had been available, none of this would have happened," Finley says. Instead, her court experience has left Finley with memories of feeling "totally helpless and powerless."
Family Court: a better way?
Another divorced mother, Kimberly Cole, now of Chesterton, lives with memories similar to Finley's.
This year, at 7:30 p.m. on Jan. 2, police knocked on Cole's door in Jackson Township.
Kimberly and Todd Cole were in the midst of a bitter divorce. The couple's son, Andrew, 2, was living with Kimberly and her son by a former marriage. Police asked only for Andrew, handing Cole a copy of a handwritten order granting her husband custody of Andrew on the grounds he was a fit father. Cole was not to see Andrew again for eight days. Cole, a nurse, says she was not able to work for nearly a month.
"I and my family suffered deep emotional separation anxiety," Cole says.
The morning after the child was taken, Cole's ex-husband appeared at her door with another court order and more police to collect all the couple's furniture and other major possessions. "I was allowed to keep my jewelry."
Cole says she was unaware at the time that her divorce had been granted Dec. 21 by Porter County Magistrate James Johnson while Cole's attorney was out of the country.
The following month, prosecutors charged Cole with battering Todd Cole's son from a former marriage, who had been living with the couple before their separation. In a curious and unusual move, prosecutors have since agreed to dismiss the felony charges provided there were no further allegations. She, like Finley, agrees a family court system would have prevented this confrontation.
The Family Court movement
The complicated lives of splintering families and the impact on communities have launched the legal community on a search for alternatives. The role of the courts in family disintegration are on the minds of national, state and local figures.
U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, in presenting a distinguished award to a Delaware family court judge last month, said, "How these cases are handled has a tremendous impact on public perceptions of what justice is in this country."
As a result of Indiana's own problems in dealing with the growing trend of families in crisis, state Supreme Court Chief Justice Randall Shepard has proposed the General Assembly consider a pilot program to explore whether a family court structure can better provide the relief families increasingly are seeking through the courts.
There is no true unified family court system in existence in Indiana, although some counties have some aspects of a family court system in place, according to state Court Administrator Bruce Kotzan.
Former Cass County Circuit Court Judge Donald Leicht, however, believes his court qualified as a true family court until it was dismantled by his successor in 1994. He has traveled the state for nearly four years touting its success.
"I think the interest in family courts arises because of growing concern about the state of the American family, and among the places you can see the ebb and flow is in courtrooms," Chief Justice Shepard said.
"Among the objectives of the family court movement is to try to get dysfunctional families in front of the same judge," Shepard continued.
What attorneys and judges tell Shepard is that today it is "quite ordinary to be in divorce court, juvenile court and criminal court," all at the same time.
"Back in the old days," Shepard said, "a single judge (handled all those issues), so it didn't really matter if a family came in again and again because there was only one judge and he knew the story so the court could do an effective job.
"Part of the idea (is) to create an internal system that achieves what those old one county court judges had," Shepard said.
Alexa said the family court concept includes a departure from the traditional adversarial approach taken by the legal community in addressing conflicts."The adversarial system, which our system of justice uses, is ill-equipped to handle domestic cases.
"In an adversarial system, you have a winner and a loser. That's not the way it's supposed to work in a domestic relations situation. Everyone's supposed to be a winner, but the justice system itself lends itself to an opposite of that," Alexa said.
According to Alexa, the current system "pits people against each other, antagonizes them every time they sit down to work things out. That's one of the things a family court addresses."
Alexa said he will push the family court legislation because "We have an opportunity to do it and have it paid for. It just seems to make sense."
Individual rights vs. family interest
The idea is not without its detractors.
Supporters argue the crisis in today's family life demands the holistic approach of the family court system to stem problems early.
Opponents, however, question whether one judge can be sufficiently neutral in dealing with an individual when they "know too much" about the family.
Former Cass County Circuit Court Judge Leicht, now a Kokomo attorney, swears by the family court system he built with the assistance of the Logansport community.
"I got terribly frustrated with several aspects of the judicial system," Leicht said of his six-year tenure as judge. "It came to my consciousness that the way we were handling cases was fostering a great deal of the problems I was seeing."
Leicht said he found members of the same family in three different courts with none of the judges communicating about anything. As a result, the judges often issued conflicting orders.
"The logical thing was to put family problems into one court where that one judge handled them," Leicht said.
Next, Leicht took steps to eliminate the adversarial aspects of getting a divorce.
"In handling divorces, we in the legal system use a glorified adversarial system which meant two people getting a divorce ended up going to war," Leicht said.
In addition to establishing a family support center, in which law enforcement, probation, caseworkers and others worked under the same roof and off a central filing system, Leicht changed his own court procedures.
No longer did attorneys for a couple engage in a discovery process "to find out everything they can about each other." Instead, Leicht issued a disclosure order asking for specific information regarding marital assets, taxes and insurance. "It eliminates the incentive to play hide and seek," Leicht said.
Leicht said the changes in the system reduced juvenile placements, whether local or out-of-state, by 35 percent in one year.
"We saved a ton of money," Leicht said. "It works."
However, Miami Circuit Court Judge Bruce Embrey, like many judges, doesn't want to be a judge who handles only family matters. And many families, he said, ask for a change of judge when a judge gets to know a family too well.
"Family members fear you might be prejudiced," Embrey said. "Every judge should have a sign above his desk that says above all else you are to be a neutral and detached magistrate," Embrey said. "You can't lose sight of that."
Embrey added a change in court structure may not be the real answer so much as the availability of more remedies to judges.
Still, that's not saying Embrey opposes family courts. He favors legislation that allows courts to opt into a family court arrangement if they choose, he said.
Porter Superior Court Judge Mary Harper, who will take the circuit and juvenile court bench in January, said the family court concept is consistent with things she's already trying to get organized in juvenile court. "It all starts with poor parenting and children who don't learn how to deal appropriately with dispute."
Harper, however, like Porter Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Thode, questioned whether a family court was a practical solution for Porter County. "It appears to me that the goals (of a family court) might very well be accomplished by the imposition of a case management system," Thode said.
Then and now
"The courts terrified me," Susan Finley says today.
Somehow the children were restored to her two months after they were taken away, she said. She never questioned it. "I was just so grateful to get them back."
Finley says "everything has worked itself out great," but only after the couple got the counseling they needed.
But the support came "after the fact," Finley says.
Finley said she would support a family court setting, where family counseling and alternative dispute resolutions are emphasized over legalities.
Finley says the couple has worked out thorny visitation issues. Only child support arrangements remain in dispute, but Finley can see an end to those problems as well, she says. "I'm hopeful come February we can get that straightened out," she says. "I don't let them interfere with visitation."
Scott Finley agrees the only outstanding issue between the couple now is child support, but he doesn't agree that police taking the children without anyone's prior knowledge was inappropriate. "(The children) couldn't understand why they had to be taken away from their mom, but I knew why," he said.
Finley said he was "very satisfied" with the system as it is in Porter County and felt Lightfoot's intercession provided a voice for fathers in a system he feels is biased towards mothers. "She was wonderful."
Finley questioned judges' impartiality in a family court system. If he had had other pending cases against him, he doesn't think one judge could separate the issues fairly. "If you go and see one judge, who's to say they're not going to hold that against you?"
But like Susan Finley, Kimberly Cole supports the idea of a more personalized court system.
"If the judge knows the family and sees all the struggles, I think they could analyze the situation a whole lot better," said Cole.
"The court is so impersonal," Cole said. "You need to be able to sit down at a table and see what you're going to do."
To the Coles, the only important lingering issue is Andrew's custody, which currently remains with Todd Cole.
In June, Kimberly Cole filed papers with the court to regain custody. She doesn't understand why it will take 10 months before she will have her day in court.
"I filed in June, couldn't get a court date until February and that's been continued until April," Cole said. "And these are (Andrew's) developmental years."
In addition to what she sees as a dawdling court system, Cole points to its cost, which is "astronomical."
Cole has incurred $18,000 in expenses, which her parents are helping to shoulder. She points to the effects on her job and her health. "It doesn't affect just me but everybody in the family."
Todd Cole withheld any comment at this time except to say, "Kim and I have been divorced for a year, and this will be the third judge we're going to see."
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