In what’s my favorite article of the year, the Gay and Lesbian Community in Minnesota has apologized for ruining the institution of marriage and causing former Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch to stray from her husband.

 ”On behalf of all gays and lesbians living in Minnesota, I would like to wholeheartedly apologize for our community’s successful efforts to threaten your traditional marriage,” reads the letter from John Medeiros. “We apologize that our selfish requests to marry those we love has cheapened and degraded traditional marriage so much that we caused you to stray from your own holy union for something more cheap and tawdry.” Link.

Hopefully, CT’s Office of Legislative Research can look into the nexus between same-sex marriage and extra marital affairs in the 2012 legislative session!

Attorney General Jepsen has compiled a web resource on the Attorney General’s webpage for domestic violence victims. I’ve uploaded this page to my Evernote account.  It is useful for lawyers who need to make referrals to social service agencies.

Last Wednesday, I was honored to attend an early breakfast in Cromwell. I was named one of Connecticut’s First 100. An award given to male leaders committed to the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence to raise awareness in regard to the availability of and access to domestic violence services. I was in some really great company including some outstanding members of the legal profession.

I'm the guy on the far right with dark hair and my side to the camera.

The breakfast really got me thinking of what it is that I can do to combat such a large problem and I’m still thinking about that.

At the end of this version of “Betterman”  that appears on the PJ20 soundtrack, Eddie Vedder urges listeners “Don’t run away”.  I can’t think of a more appropriate chorus for Connecticut’s First 100 leaders.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The parties got divorced in 2007 by entering into a separation agreement. The agreement contained a merger clause stating there were no outstanding issues between the parties other than those set forth in the dissolution agreement.

The plaintiff then brought suit against the defendant in New York for a claim that was 10 years old. The New York court dismissed the plaintiff’s claims as “meritless” “outrageous” and “designed to harass”.

The Plaintiff should have spent less time in court and more time listening to the Beatles:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yesterday, I spent the day in Magistrate’s Court. Magistrate’s court principally concerns matters of unpaid child support.

While waiting for my case to be called, I watched a man go to jail for not paying child support. The man owed approximately $30,000 in back support.

Yesterday marked about the dozenth time the man appeared in court for failing to pay support over the past year. He’d been given chance after chance to get a job and start making payments.  He claimed to have done job searches but lacked any proof he had done anything remotely close to a job search.

He said he was starting a job being paid $3 an hour under the table next week. The judge didn’t buy that.

When it became apparent to everyone in the courtroom the man was going to jail – he pleaded with the judge for one more day to come up with a payment. He was sure he could find the money. The judge told him to that if he had access to any money that now would be a great time to make a payment but the man predictably had no money on him.

The judge found that the man had flaunted all sorts of prior orders and explained that in order for the court to exist its orders need to mean something.

As the marshals circled the man, he pleaded some more. But to no avail.

The judge ordered him to be incarcerated. He was placed in handcuffs and removed from the court.

Justice was done. No doubt about it.

The irony is the man can’t pay child support because he doesn’t have a job. For the period of his incarceration, his ability to obtain a job went from unlikely to impossible.

Post originally published on April 30, 2010

Most of my clients have to take the day off from work to attend family court. Early arrival is usually imperative so that way a party can get his name written in on the top of the sign up sheet.

Every person with a motion must first meet with a family relations counselor. Before seeing a judge a party must first see Family Relations.

Many matters are resolved at this point. The Family mediation staff is excellent. The problem is that there are too few mediators, too many cases, and too little time.

If a case isn’t resolved it then gets assigned to a hearing before a judge on another day or the parties wait for an available judge. Sometimes it’s not until late in the day before a party gets before a judge.

For the life of me, I’ve never been able to understand why parties didn’t have set times to appear before family relations. Scheduling mediations with family relations at specified times would prevent people taking time off from work to sit in a hallway.

If parties are unable to come to an agreement then the matter should be scheduled for a court hearing at a later date.

Such a system would also benefit Connecticut businesses who now lose full days of work from their employees.

This idea is not without problems.  The largest problem would be scheduling times. It’s hard to get 4 or 5 people together on short notice. Implementing this idea would require radical changes to the way things operate. Anytime major changes are made – problems are bound to arise.

But that shouldn’t stop the Judicial Branch from trying such a system. In fact the foreclosure mediation program specifically schedules mediation times.

The less time we all spend waiting in hallways the better.

It doesn’t matter that you don’t have much if any money. If you have children, you have a reason to do a will.

You and your spouse can die together. There are plenty of opportunities for this to happen. Usually it doesn’t happen but sometimes a car gets hit head on by an 18 wheeler.

If you and your spouse die, your kids, aside from being devastated will be placed in legal limbo. Legal limbo means some complete stranger will decide who gets to raise your kids.

I’ve met a lot of judges.  All of the judges that I’ve met work diligently to “get it” right. But no matter how hard a judge works, she can’t possibly know everything you do about your relatives.

Most of the harm will be done by family members who think they’re acting in the child’s best interest. This may or may not involve your living relatives spending large sums of money to bitterly fight with each other in court.

And if anyone senses that there may be money involved….watch out. Right now, everybody fights over every small amount of money. If the last words you read are “MACK” your estates may have a potentially significant wrongful death claim.  Relatives who didn’t care about your children when you were living will suddenly want to parent them.

My point is that you need to decide who will take care of your children in the event something happens to you. You. Not a judge. Not your Aunt. You.

Telling someone who you want to care for you children doesn’t count. Doing a will does.

Naming a guardian is perhaps the last and best gift that you could give to your children and family members.

Love your children enough to name a guardian for them.

Dogs are expensive. Especially, sick dogs.

Any dog owner understands that pet medical bills can be no small expense.

Under Connecticut law, pets are personal property. There is little legal difference between a dog and a car.

Recently, a Connecticut Superior Court in the case of Geiger v. Geiger was confronted with the issue of post divorce pet medical bills.

The court ordered that the husband and the wife are to equally divide the costs of medical treatment for dogs.

The court treated the dogs as if they were marital debt. Think about that the next time you think of buying a pet. Pets are not just personal property. They have the potential to become marital debt.

To put it another way, pets are a pain in the asset.

I don’t often agree with the Journal Inquirer’s, Chris Powell.  One of his recent columns, “Forget Fixing DCF;  attack the slob culture” struck a chord with me. Many columnists love to bash DCF. In truth, DCF deserves some of the criticism it receives.

Powell argues that the problem isn’t DCF it’s that society has disintegrated to a point where no agency can manage the problems facing our society.

Recently I was speaking with a DCF employee. He told me that one of the recent trends was for mother’s who have already had children taken from them because they were unfit, to get pregnant and name their children things like “Property DCF Smith”.

Inevitably, DCF ends up removing such children from their mothers and having to file petitions to rename them.

You’ve got to be kidding me.

Powell’s right, our problems run much deeper than all that’s wrong with DCF.

Connecticut civil unions are about to go the way of the dinosaurs. Official time of death is 11:59:59 tonight.

On October 1, 2010, Connecticut’s civil union laws will be repealed. Absent a proceeding having been initiated for dissolution, annulment or legal separation – all existing civil unions will convert to marriages. This is strange.

Triceratops skeleton at the American Museum of Natural History photo by Michael Gray

Our Supreme Court has said that civil unions are different than marriages.

People knowingly entered into civil unions. Maybe they preferred, for whatever reason, having a civil union. The legislature has either forced such couples to dissolve their union or get married – whether they want to or not.

If the legislature forced all opposite-sex married couples into civil unions, I’d expect Connecticut citizens to be outraged.

At any rate, civil unions are on their way out in Connecticut.