[This case study will extend through several posts. My comments appear in italicized brackets.]
In the early 1990s, I watched Chief Judge Jeremiah make a strong effort to respond to some domestic violence cases, especially when people contacted him directly about the dangers they faced. He sometimes took over judging those cases himself.
Sometimes he favored abusers, like the police officer who held custody of his daughter for a dozen years while he kept getting his ex-wife arrested on false charges.
Often Chief Jeremiah brought in his close circle of lawyers and staff to work on cases. [I thought some of them abused their power, as in the Case Study, at 3, below.]
People who received the Chief’s personal help were grateful, while the Family Court system as a whole continued putting vulnerable children at risk-- along with the parents trying to protect them, who were traumatized by the Court as much as by their abusers.
Pettinato’s “friendly parent” standard (see post 8, below) required judges to force children into damaging relationships with aggressively manipulative personalities—like one I will call “Vincent,” who drove judges crazy.
Vincent’s relatives said he had suffered extreme child abuse, but he would not talk about it. As an adult, he refused to take orders from anyone. He married three times and insisted on controlling his wives and children.
Vincent’s bullying behavior distressed professionals outside and within Family Court, including a series of judges. He tried to control his second family through the court for 14 years (1992-2006). He manipulated the court process at enormous cost to his children, to his former wife, and to taxpayers who funded those fourteen years in operating costs, overhead and salaries of judges, sheriffs, clerks, stenographers, DCYF staff, and many others on public payrolls.
Vincent drove a series of judges to distraction—especially Jeremiah, O’Brien, Lipsey, and Forte.
Lipsey finally figured out what was going on and even named it. But instead of making a finding, he did something extraordinary and recused himself. He explained that Rhode Island's Code of Judicial Conduct precluded him from ruling on the case because, after studying all the evidence, he had become biased against Vincent!
The case went next to Forte, its twelfth judge, who revealed intense bias against Vincent’s wife, but never showed any qualms of conscience about Canon 3E of the Judicial Code.
Most judges preferred to blame both sides without recognizing (as Lipsey did) that one side was very clearly at fault.
NEXT: 9.B. A chronology of Vincent’s case
