Father sues Colorado for civil rights violations
Seeks Federal takeover of family law judiciary
Web posted Mar. 10, 2003, 9:45 a.m.
A Denver father filed suit in federal court Friday seeking to permanently put an end to an industry he calls the "most corrupt organization in American history."
Robert Muchnick, a divorced father of two and executive director of the Denver-based Center for Children's Justice, is asking the U.S. District Court to declare that Colorado's so-called "best interest of the child" statute and a related law are unconstitutional and to permanently enjoin their enforcement by state courts.
He is also asking the federal court to assume an ongoing supervisory role over the domestic relations division of the state's judicial department to ensure future compliance with constitutional restrictions on judicial action in divorce and child custody cases.
"The state apparatus for dealing with child custody and parenting time in divorce and never-married situations is a huge shakedown racket," Muchnick said. "The laws foment controversy and create an artificial need for professionals to come in and sort things out between conflicted parents. And that makes for an enormous, profit-generating industry where the Constitution says there can be no real controversy in most cases."
Muchnick, who brought his action under the Civil Rights Act, referred to the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides that all citizens deserve the equal protection of the laws, as one of the constitutional provisions which is regularly violated by family courts under the statutes. Other constitutional provisions include substantive due process and what he called the "liberty interest in family relations."
"It's impossible to get justice in the state courts," Muchnick said. "You can litigate until you're blue in the face. The judges do whatever they want, they completely ignore your rights, and they won't visit or re-visit horrible violations of individual rights. If anyone but a family court judge stole your children like this and blocked your ability to see them and be a parent to them, they'd be locked up for 20 years to life. Stealing children is nothing short of pure terrorism."
Muchnick contends the law is constitutionally flawed because it permits the statutory "best interest" factors to be applied arbitrarily by judges, resulting in capricious state actions and unequal and unpredictable outcomes given similar sets of circumstances.
"Family law is the biggest organized criminal enterprise in the history of the United States," Muchnick said. "It makes the Mafia look like a bunch of Girl Scouts. At least the Mafia had selectivity in their victims. Family courts destroy almost everybody who gets near them."
He likened his effort for a federal takeover of the judiciary to the school desegregation efforts which started in the 1950s. "The 'best interests' statute, with the knowing complicity of corrupt family law judges, has given America its newest N-word," he said. "It's called the 'non-custodial parent.'"
Muchnick summarized the process: "First, the judge suspends the Constitution and strips you of your rights and your children. Then he makes you beg to get a shred of rights and time with the kids back, throws restraining orders on you, threatens to or actually puts you in jail, all the while shaking you down for fees to the lawyers and the other parasites, like evaluators and Guardians ad Litem, who charge three figures per hour to probe into your private life in excruciating detail. And if you don't play the judge's game and pay and cooperate, you lose. Everything -- kids, rights, money, freedom.
"Sounds like classic Mafia tactics, doesn't it?" he asked. "Family law is nothing less than state-sponsored terror on a scale unprecedented since the regimes of Lenin and Stalin and Idi Amin."
Muchnick stressed that in the majority of cases where children are in dispute, the mother gets "unlimited power" over them merely as a result of a judge's findings and ruling under the statute, and fathers are thrust out of any meaningful involvement in children's lives.
"The pragmatic effect of such an arbitrary and vague law," he said, "is that family law judges have virtually infinite discretion to allocate family relationships and responsibilities according to their own biases and prejudices.
"When a court can essentially steal your children and your fundamental, inalienable rights under the guise of some capriciously and arbitrarily applied legal standard, we as a society have a drastic and serious problem," Muchnick said. "This forced removal of fathers, and sometimes even mothers, from children's lives for no good reason except the whim of a judge affects many millions of parents and children nationwide, and the children always wind up getting damaged."
The state can step in when a compelling interest has been demonstrated -- as, for example, when a parent fails to adequately care for or protect his or her children or is actually abusive, Muchnick explained. But in the overwhelming majority of cases there is no parental abuse of children and both parents are normal, fit people, he stressed.
"In that majority of cases, the only judicial interest can be in insuring that both parents' rights are equally protected under our federal and state Constitutions, and that children have full and equal access to both parents," he said.
"That requires some compromise and adjustment," Muchnick pointed out. "But divorce, like marriage and other major life events, changes things and imposes responsibilities and burdens on parents which didn't exist during the marriage. We have to adapt to the new realities for the sake of our childen's well-being."
Muchnick's organization, the Center for Children's Justice, is a multi-state political and litigative action group focused on the rights of children of divorce and those born to never-married parents to equal access to both parents.
I haven't researched what happened, but unfortunately this organization is no longer around.