…because even if you have a rock-solid, slam-dunk winning case, fully documented, with decisions in your favor from Federal circuit courts, if you walk into court without an attorney and the other side has an attorney, you will get steamrolled ninety-nine times out of a hundred.
Chris and Mel temporarily lost their kids this way.
It sounds as though they also got a shovel-full of what we in the legal community call “hometowning” — the opposing counsel and the small-town judge had some history together — but even absent that, I’d not have bet on a positive outcome.
Judges want nothing more than to get cases off their desks, even when it’s not Friday afternoon before a long weekend. Given the chance to punt an international child-custody case back to Canada, odds were the judge was gonna do it absent some vigorous argument by counsel for Chris and Mel.
And here’s the thing — it’s gotta be counsel making the argument, not you. No matter how effective you may think you are as an advocate for your cause, trust me — judges generally won’t believe a tenth of what you say, because you’re a civilian. They will believe about half of what comes out of my mouth, but only because I’ve got a law license and they think they can trust the “integrity of the bar” and other such crap notions.
I’ve done this sort of thing myself when my company’s been sued in small-claims court by consumers — who in some cases could have won if they knew their way around a courtroom, but they didn’t, so I crushed them — and I’m not even a trial lawyer.
Read the whole thing. They need temporary lodging while Mel goes to court in Canada (with a lawyer this time) to get the kids back, so if you’re in Washington State near the Canadian border you might be able to help them out….
Yeah, I had a premonition of what happened when I read on their blog a while back that they were going to go to court Pro Per.
I’ll echo your experience, except my observations come from watching incarcerated persons try to represent themselves with hand-written pleadings, laboriously researched in the prison libraries, and usually advised by a “jailhouse lawyer”. Those result in the prisoners almost NEVER gaining their freedom.
There are actually a few judges who will lean over backwards to help a Pro Per litigant, but not many.
Problem is, there are so many little things that can trip up a Pro Per litigant, little things that an attorney learns by rote in law school.
BTW, Chris and Mel ought to enlist some legal help from the SAF, because the main issue in this custody case in Canada is the presence of guns in their home, and the Canadian court is trying to impose Canadian law, which as we all know is very anti-gun, on an American couple in the United States.
The SAF ought to make some effort to stomp this legal precedent down, because it smacks of that whole liberal idea of we Americans needing to import legal principles from other countries instead of relying on the guidance of our Federal Constitution.
This simply tells me again that our society is overly litigious and run too often by lawyers.
No argument here.
Not sure an attorney would have helped here, when the judge doesn’t want to hear arguments or view evidence.
How pathetic, though. ‘Wah, I don’t want to deal with this on a Friday’. Suck it up, Your Bitchiness, this is why you wear the robe and carry the gavel.
I’ve tossed them a little scratch in the tip jar. What I’d really like to do is work that judge over with a length of PVC piping.