Will do some 'research' on this judge and her case history and report back if anything interesting is found. To me it sounds like the judge wanted this to be a nice and easy shared custody arrangement and it was as if the entire relationship history and multiple contempt of court actions by the STBX never happened. Reading some of these rulings is truly like taking a step into the TWILIGHT ZONE! Judges like this one seem to just be pushing paper across their desks with little to no consideration of the children and the former spouse. Pathetic IMO. MOO completely! I've now read over 150 documents and the entire file is filled with information being presented and rulings like this one.
My clients feel the same way at times. But from the judge's perspective they have endless, non-stop cases where people make up the most outlandish things about one another and/or are caught lying or violating orders.
But they don't end in murder.
In pretty much every state the standard is the best interests of the children and most states believe that frequent and continuous access to both parents is best.
So the end goal is always time with a parent even if that parent is troubled.
Here, this guy was granted supervised visitation. That's highly restrictive in the world of family law. Someone has to essentially babysit him and follow him during all his time with the kids.
And he was not granted overnights.
Eventually those restrictions would probably be lifted though if he demonstrated that he was calming down or had taken an anger management course or something.
It's frustrating because sometimes these parents really damage the kids. But the parental reltaitonhsip and parental rights are sacrosanct.
That's why I'm the dependency court system reunification is the end goal even in cases like little Maleah Davis, who kept showing up at the hospital with suspicious "injuries" and we all know how that turned out.
But the fact is that in 99.9999% of family law cases, no one ends up dead.
Of course that doesn't factor in the emotional dmaage to kids from an angry, crazy parent but I guess they figure the emotional damage from not seeing a parent would be worse.
I will say that in the majority of cases parents acting out after separation and during the pendency of the case seem to calm down once the divorce action has concluded. And judges know that.
It's a hard thing to deal with for these judges who have nothing but crazy cases - one after another - and no real way to fix the parents. And no real way to tell which one will actually become that nightmare realized with a dead spouse or dead or physically damaged or kidnapped kids.