NPO Blog Archive

St Joseph, MO–From the Associated Press’ Sex Offender Banned from Son’s Graduation (5/10/08):

“School and law enforcement officials have told a St. Joseph man that he can’t attend his son’s eighth-grade graduation because he is a convicted sex offender and isn’t allowed on school property.

“James Jones, 36, said he may go anyway although the Buchanan County Sheriff’s Department has told him he would be arrested and face up to four years in prison.

“‘I’ve already been punished for this. This isn’t about me anymore. Now they’re punishing my kids, and that’s taking it a little too far,’ said Jones, who served five years in prison after being convicted in 1990 of forcible rape of a 15-year-old girl when he was 17.

“‘I’m always preaching education to my children. How does that make me look if I’m not there at graduation?’..

“Sheriff’s investigator Shawn Collie said although Jones has argued against the school property restriction more than any other offender, he has signed an agreement acknowledging he knows about the restriction. That means he can’t claim ignorance if found on school grounds, such as for the May 22 graduation.

“‘We’ll be there. And we’ll arrest him if he’s there,’ Collie said.”

A few thoughts:

1) Regarding the rape, he was convicted, so let’s assume he’s guilty. “Forcible rape” is pretty bad stuff, and it’s real hard to feel sorry for a rapist. Yes, Jones was only 17, and that’s young, but it’s old enough to know it’s wrong to cause other people pain. And I’m sure that two decades later the young woman he assaulted still suffers because of it.

2) Prison is supposed to be about punishment and rehabilitation. Rape is a terrible crime, but Jones paid for it with five long years in prison–upon his release, he’s paid his debt to society and should not be subjected to further punishment.

3) The best thing for society is if criminals are able to be rehabilitated, and from what we see in the article, it sounds as if Jones is an excellent and admirable example of this rehabilitation. For this, Jones deserves credit, not exile.

4) It probably will mean a lot to his son for him to be at his graduation, and will be hurtful if he can’t attend.

All in all, I side with Jones.

Thanks to Jeremy, a reader, for sending the story.

Maplewood, MN–According to Jury convicts wife of forging checks while her husband was serving in Iraq (Minneapolis Star Tribune, 5/2/08):

“Dana M. Kieser deceived and defrauded her husband when he was at his most vulnerable, serving in Iraq with the Minnesota National Guard, a Ramsey County jury heard Friday.

“She closed out John Kieser’s retirement and college-savings accounts, forged his name on two checks totaling almost $25,000, bought a home in Fargo, N.D., and sold their home in Maplewood — all without his knowledge or consent, prosecutor Laura Rosenthal said.

“Dana Kieser showed little emotion when the verdicts were read. John Kieser was in the courtroom, too, but he clearly took no joy in them. He was served with divorce papers while home on leave in early January 2007 but still held out hope for reconciliation, even two months after his tour of duty ended in July.

“The couple’s contested divorce is pending in North Dakota. Dana Kieser said during testimony that she has custody of their two boys, ages 6 and 4…

“Rosenthal said that Dana Kieser left her husband essentially homeless and that he never has and never will live in the Fargo house.

“District Judge James Clark set sentencing for June 12. Dana Kieser is unlikely to serve any time in prison. The presumptive sentence for check forgery is a stayed sentence. The amount of restitution would be determined by probation officials.”

There are many, many truths which this case illustrates. Here’s a few:

1) It is usually the woman, not the man, who initiatives the divorce and breaks up the family, and it is often done without a genuinely compelling reason.

2) It is often husbands, not wives, who “hold out hope for reconciliation” and try to work the marriage out.

3) Many men are in harm’s way in Iraq or Afghanistan and are–let’s be blunt–stabbed in the back by their wives. Sometimes it’s through wives looting them, as in this story. More often it’s through women initiating unwarranted divorces and then moving “back home” with their kids, and then making weighty financial demands upon the father. As I explained in my co-authored column Protect Deployed Parents” Rights (Trenton Times & several others, 11/11/06), “Many married parents deploy overseas, never suspecting that their parenthood essentially ended the day they left home.” In most cases, the victimized parent is the father. It is indicative of our society’s disregard for men and fathers that there is no negative social stigma attached to these acts.

This represents a societal change, and a bad one. When my grandfather was fighting against Germany in the Argonne Forest in 1918, can you imagine what the reaction would have been if my grandmother had left him? She would have been condemned–rightly–for betraying her husband. Her relatives would have told her, “How can you betray him when he is in danger? How could you take a man’s kids away while he is abroad? Why are you breaking up your family unnecessarily?” This ethos is long gone now. (To learn more, see my blog posts Reflections on Veterans Day Part I and Part II.)

4) I had to laugh at the line “[Prosecutor] Rosenthal said that Dana Kieser left her husband essentially homeless.” Actually, we don’t have any problem with that–the wife could have made a false claim that the husband “threatened her” or that she is “afraid of him” and she would have easily gotten a restraining order which would have barred him from his home and made him homeless. Hundreds of thousands of women do this every year and nobody even blinks. To learn more, see my co-authored column Letterman Case Shows Problems with Restraining Orders (Albuquerque Tribune, 1/17/06).

5) I get letters all the time from soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan who tell me that their wives have cleaned out their accounts and disappeared, and I doubt that 1 in 10 of them ever gets justice for it. My first thought in reading this story was “Dana Kieser must have really screwed up–women get away with this all the time.”

6) After all of this, “Dana Kieser is unlikely to serve any time in prison. The presumptive sentence for check forgery is a stayed sentence. The amount of restitution would be determined by probation officials.” So all that happens might be that she is asked to pay some of it back, though even that amount will probably be light, because, after all, she’s a single mother with two kids to take care of.

7) Dana Kieser lied and deceived but she has custody and probably will keep custody and John Kieser will face stiff child support obligations. Despite her crime and the criminal conviction, in the end, she wins and he loses.

The full Minneapolis Star Tribune article is here. More details can be found in this video and also this older article.

Los Angeles, CA–“This reinforces the notion that a man’s value as a father only goes as far as his ability to earn money. ‘What’s important to black men in a society that has a fair amount of racism is a notion of manhood,’ says Mark Anthony Neal, an associate professor of black popular culture at Duke University. ‘Manhood is all they have, and what that usually means in our culture is the ability to provide for your family financially.’

“This role is easy to fill when you’re Snoop Dogg, the millionaire rapper who stars in his own family reality show. But for low-income, low-skilled black men, keeping consistent employment isn’t always easy. A 2007 study noted that a black father’s ability to financially contribute is one of the biggest determinants of whether he stays in the home.

“‘There’s a host of evidence noting that men who cannot fulfill the breadwinner role often experience distress and interruptions in positive engagement in family life,’ says Boston University professor Rebekah Levine Coley, who worked on the study.

“Low-income, low-skilled men are culturally expected not to care about being good fathers, and those who do care feel like failures when they cannot meet a definition of successful fatherhood in which being the breadwinner is the sole metric. This conundrum gives rise to the absentee father, the lion who would rather be proud than lead his pride.”–Josh Alston, Newsweek

Excellent article on black fathers by Josh Alston of Newsweek, and I thank Josh for being kind enough to send it to me. I have long argued that our popular perception of black fathers is distorted and unfair–they (and fathers in general) certainly bear some of the blame for broken families, but only some.

Alston’s full article is O Father, Where Art Thou? Statistics show disturbing rates of absent black fathers, but a new book depicts the nuance behind the numbers (Newsweek, 5/10/08).

To write a Letter to the Editor of Newsweek, click on Letters@newsweek.com.

To learn more about the challenges faced by black fathers, see my co-authored columns Leonard Pitts” Column Unfair to Black Fathers, Ignores Reasons for Father Absence (The Southern Illinoisan & others, 3/6/08) and Tyler Perry”s Daddy”s Little Girls Tells an Important Truth About African-American Fathers (Los Angeles Watts Times, 6/14/07)

Springfield, IL–The Belleville News-Democrat in Illinois reports that the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) “wrongly placed more than 3,000 people on the State”s official list of child abusers over a five year period…’

Why should the family court reform movement care about what happens to child abusers? After all, a lot of these parents are less-then-perfect, and they probably did something wrong, you say.

The reason we care is that non-custodial parents are often up against the same problems as men and women falsely accused of child abuse: arrogant, self-righteous government officials who have been given too much power and are accountable to no one.

Listen to the complaints of the victims and their attorneys and you will hear a familiar echo.

Nick Brunstein, one falsely accused foster parent said of child abuse investigators, “…the bad ones have the power of God and with the stroke of a pen they can ruin your life.’ Sounds pretty much like a GAL or a family court judge doesn”t it?

Diane Redleaf, executive director of the non-profit Family Defense Center in Chicago said, “We see so many cases where the basic rules are being ignored completely by the state investigators.’ This too has a familiar ring.

Chicago attorney Robert Lehrer said, “They [the accused parents] can”t afford a lawyer and don”t believe they have a chance.’ So most give up and back down. Sound familiar?

Although Brunstein and his wife eventually won in court, he said, “Our savings are wiped out, and our caseworker who wanted to take our foster kids and hurt us did exactly that. No one at DCFS will be held accountable.’ Hundreds of our members could say the same thing about family court.

What is the attitude of the DCFS when confronted with over 3,000 mistakes they made? Spokesman Kendall Marlowe “acknowledged that mistakes are made, but he said the vast majority of people… were placed there properly… he declined further comment.’

The DCFS chief administrative law judge Meryl Paniak said “A lot of what happens at these hearings is it becomes a legal process, not… whether it happened or not, but whether enough evidence is presented.’

Not a hint of apology, not a whiff of promise to a better job. In one word, arrogant.

DCFS hearings are closed to the public. They admit hearsay evidence. The decisions of their judges are not open to the public. They cannot be sued for mistakes, even when the mistakes are egregious, or downright malicious. The legal standard to which they are held is ridiculously low: the DCFS makes its decisions based only on “credible evidence.’ In other words, the judges can do pretty much whatever they feel like.

Basically, they are secret courts. Secret courts breed corruption no matter how lofty their reasons sound for being secret. The secret legal proceedings at Guantanamo have caused an uproar, but where is the uproar over the hundreds of thousands of secret proceedings in family court and in child abuse cases?

Sooner or later, this movement is going to have to take on the widespread abuses of the child protective services.

Below are some recent articles and items of interest from Fathers & Families’ latest News Digest.

Police searching for non-paying parents (Kentucky Post, 5/14/08)

Child support lawsuit against Bears’ Briggs close to settlement (Chicago Tribune, 5/14/08)

Gay ex-governor says he has no money for alimony in divorce (Associated Press, 5/14/08)

Child support agency plans public campaign (Akron Leader Publications, 5/15/08)

Kids do care for divorced parents (Globe and Mail, 5/15/08)

Father reunited with his abducted son in Macon (ABC, 5/16/08)

Indian child opts for rich father (BBC, 5/16/08)

Dead beat mom owed nearly $18500 in back child support (The Union Leader, 5/16/08)

Michigan dad fights for joint custody law (Detroit News, 5/19/08)

Relationships: Social status a factor in divorce (The News-Press, 5/18/08)

Fairfield, KY–Several days ago I shared this outrageous story with you–Father Jailed Because His Adult Daughter Fails to Get Her GED. In the case, father Brian Gegner was ordered to see to it that his daughter gets her GED, but she has not done so, in part because she struggles with math. The daughter’s problems in school came at a time when she lived with her mother. The daughter herself–now almost 19-years-old–says that she alone is responsible for her own problems and that her father shouldn’t be blamed. Nevertheless, the father is in jail on a six month sentence, and Butler County Judge David Niehaus said he would only release him if the daughter passed her GED.

In my Wednesday morning blog post Protest Ohio Outrage: Father Jailed Because His Daughter Didn’t Get Her GED!, Michael Robinson of the California Alliance for Families and Children and I urged all of you to call Niehaus and also the Governor of Ohio to demand Brian Gegner’s release. We have just received some excellent news–the judge in the case has backed down, and has released the father. He will remain free as long as his daughter merely attends GED classes, as opposed to having to pass the GED.

While this is still an abuse of judicial authority, it is also a big step forward for father Brian Gegner, and a reasonable face-saving measure for Niehaus. Apparently the bad press and the many phone calls demanding Gegner’s release–some of which came from you, our readers–had an effect. I thank all of you who participated in this campaign, and give special thanks to Robinson for his fine work on the case.

From the story Judge Says He Will Release Father If Daughter Attends GED Class (Kentucky Post, 5/16/08):

“The Fairfield father who was put in jail after his daughter failed to obtain her General Equivalency Diploma (GED) will be released from jail on Friday.

“After a heated hearing, Butler County Judge David Niehaus told Brian Gegner he will let him out of jail if his daughter attends a class to prepare for the GED test.

“Gegner’s daughter must also schedule the test before the next court date.”

Syndicated columnist Amy Alkon discussed our campaign today in Fail Math? Daddy Goes To Jail.

To learn more about the case, including some interesting details Robinson uncovered, see my blog post Protest Ohio Outrage: Father Jailed Because His Daughter Didn’t Get Her GED!

Los Angeles, CA–“You’ve never heard complaints about paying child support until it’s a woman who has to pay it.”–Seattle Family Law Attorney Lisa Scott

“Courts almost never allow men to get downward modifications on their child support. I represented a guy who earned $33,000 a month and paid $12,000 in child support. His company went bust and his income crashed down to zero.

“We went in and asked for a downward modification–not an elimination of child support, but a downward modification. The judge said ‘no,’ and told him ‘tough luck–you’re capable of earning $30,000 a month, so go do it. I don’t care if you live under a highway underpass in the meantime, just pay your support as ordered.'”–Los Angeles family law attorney Adam Sacks

Anne Heche (pictured) is having a hard time paying her child support and it’s a good thing she’s a woman, so she gets preferential treatment. Apparently Heche has had some career troubles and bad luck and the court is allowing her to skip an upcoming payment. The court is probably correct–I don’t know the details–but were the genders reversed, I doubt the court would be so accomodating.

The full article is Anne Heche Doesn’t Have to Pay for July (EOnline, 5/14/08).

I’ve previously discussed Anne Heche’s divorce in A Fathers’ Rights Perspective on Anne Heche’s Divorce/Custody Settlement and A Crucial Point Missed in the Anne Heche/Coleman Laffoon Custody Battle. On the subject of women paying alimony, see From WomenPayingSupport.com–‘Be a Man…Don’t Ask for Spousal Support.

[Late note: Vote for shared parenting in the Detroit News’ reader poll by clicking here. The News asks readers the question “Should kids’ time be divided equally between separated parents?”]

Michigan–Michigan shared parenting groups have been fighting to pass HB 4564, a shared parenting bill, and have gained considerable support in the process. The bill was heard in the Michigan House Judiciary Committee on May 7 in a testimony-only hearing, and Jim Semerad of Dads and Moms of Michigan, an affiliate of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, told me this morning that he would like your assistance in getting the Committee to bring the bill to a vote. He asks that my readers, including readers who do not reside in Michigan, do the following:

1) Call Judiciary Committee chair Rep. Paul Condino (517) 373-1788 and Michigan Rep. Glenn Steil Jr. (517) 373-0147 and tell them you support HB 4564.

2) Write Condino and Steil a 250-400 word letter explaining why not having shared parenting has negatively impacted your children. To email Condino and Steil, click here.

Please be polite, leave rhetoric and name-calling out of it, and stick to the negative impact that the win/lose custody system has had upon your children. Semerad says that letters from children of divorce explaining how shared parenting would have helped them during their childhoods are particularly important, as are letters from noncustodial mothers, stepmothers, and grandmothers.

Again, to email Condino and Steil, click here. Feel free to post the letters you send as comments in this blog post.

Michigan shared parenting activists got a nice media write-up today with a front page article in the Detroit News about shared parenting and HB 4564. The article discusses the pros and cons of HB 4564 and also discusses Michigan shared parenting activist Robert Petersen’s annual shared parenting bike trip from Michigan to Washington DC. The article is Kim Kozlowski’s Michigan father fights for joint custody law: Parents’ equal access to children called a civil rights issue; critics say policy may hurt kids (Detroit News, 5/18/08). Kozlowski writes:

“…child custody is perhaps the most heated issue between parents when they split up and try to restructure their lives with their children.

“Michigan hasn’t kept reports on custody arrangements for several years, but the latest information, in 2003, shows that the Friend of the Court recommended physical custody of the children for mothers in 68 percent of the 14,470 cases that year, while fathers were recommended 12 percent of the time. Joint custody was recommended in 2,717 cases — about 18 percent…

“Since the 1990s, Michigan fathers have been trying to get the laws changed to force the courts to immediately presume equal joint custody.

“A hearing was recently held on the fourth bill introduced in the Michigan Legislature, but it was not voted out of the House Judiciary Committee. It includes an exception for unfit parents…

“Michigan dads say their effort is growing — four new state organizations support the issue, and their ranks have grown from 5,000 to 20,000 people, said Lake Orion resident Jim Semerad, one of the leaders in Michigan’s movement.

“The growth appears to be eclipsing grass-roots groups headed by custodial mothers.”

The full article can be seen here. To learn more about the shared parenting bill, also see my recent co-authored column, Shared Parenting Bill Will Help Michigan”s Kids, Overburdened Court System (Oakland Press, 5/5/08)

Again, Michigan shared parenting activists ask that you call and write Judiciary Committee chair Rep. Paul Condino (517) 373-1788 and Michigan Rep. Glenn Steil Jr. (517) 373-0147 and tell them you support the shared parenting bill. Condino’s and Steil’s phone #s, fax #s, and email addresses are below. To email Condino and Steil, click here.

Rep. Paul Condino
Mailing Address
P.O. Box 30014
Lansing, MI 48909-7514
Phone: (517) 373-1788
Fax: (517) 373-5880
Toll-Free
(866) 864-PAUL
(866) 864-7285
Email: paulcondino@house.mi.gov

Rep. Glenn Steil Jr.
District 72
Phone: 517-373-0147
GlennSteil@house.mi.gov