Busy Divorce Courts Unraveling Like Some Marriages

The hallway outside San Diego County’s divorce courts one day last week looked like the waiting room of a dingy, backwater bus station. Grim-faced men and women tried not to look one another in the eye. Grandparents cooed at infants in a futile effort to silence their crying. Nuns in black habits passed out pamphlets on the virtues of family life.

Inside, the three courtrooms hummed like well-greased assembly lines.

In less than four minutes, Superior Court Judge Thomas Murphy ordered Albert Padilla to spend 15 days in jail for failing to pay child support.

Later, it took just 10 minutes to sever the 67-year marriage of Lucile and Alfred Stringe. Lucile, 89, claimed that Alfred, 92, was abusive and that he had excluded her from their home. Alfred did not appear in court.

“What do I do?” Murphy wondered aloud. “I can divide money real easily. But do I kick him out? And if he’s disabled, where does he go?”

Lawyers for the elderly couple agreed to a division of the Stringes’ bank accounts and for Mrs. Stringe to gain possession of the house in a couple of months. Then Murphy, a former domestic lawyer himself, granted them a divorce.

So it went, through case after case, on this typical Monday morning--through the 26 broken marriages on Murphy’s morning court calendar and the comparable agendas of the two other divorce court judges.

Harried judges dispensed justice with an eye on the clock and a thought, perhaps, of the Bible story tacked to a bulletin board outside Murphy’s court--the parable of King Solomon’s threat to slice a child in half as a way of determining who its mother truly was.

Increasing numbers of lawyers, however, are growing weary of the machine-gun style of domestic justice dispensed in the San Diego County Courthouse. Family law specialists say divorcing couples--whose filing fees contribute more than $2 million per year toward the courts’ budget--for too long have gotten short shrift.

Some attorneys are demanding more judges with more time to consider the life-altering issues that underlie nearly every divorce. The lawyers want judges familiar with and interested in family law handling domestic cases--more judges like Murphy, not new judges on their first assignments who often find the work foreign and distasteful.

Other domestic law experts are calling for a realignment of the divorce courts and the juvenile court to streamline procedures and save mistreated children from falling through the slats of a many-tiered judicial system.

“It’s just a train wreck of confusion,” San Diego attorney E. Gregory Alford, chairman of a San Diego County Bar Assn. committee of family law specialists, said in describing a domestic court system he considers desperately overburdened.

“We’ve been in a crisis stage for the past five years,” added attorney Thomas Ashworth III, a former chairman of the bar advisory panel.

The long-boiling dissatisfaction is bubbling into open view as the Superior Court and the county Board of Supervisors consider a plan to move the three domestic relations courts, the court’s Family Counseling Services and the probate court into a leased building three-quarters of a mile from the central courthouse.

Court officials say the proposed move to the building John Burnham & Co. is vacating at 1566 6th Ave. is designed to open up space at the courthouse, allowing for the addition of long-awaited, much-needed judges to the Superior Court bench.

“Domestic (is) an area that can be pulled out of the mainstream and put in a different location and not impact that greatly on the rest of court operations,” said William Pierce, executive officer of the Superior Court.

However, many divorce lawyers see the proposed move as another in what they consider a long series of decisions shunting aside divorcing couples and their problems. “Our view is that they’re trying to put the unpleasant, crummy, junk stuff elsewhere,” Alford said last week.

But rather than oppose the transfer, the bar committee is using it as an opportunity to campaign for an increase in the number of judges assigned to domestic cases and the creation of a “Family Court” composed of judges who specifically desire to preside in domestic proceedings.

“We’re trying to make the best of what could otherwise be a very bad situation,” Alford said.

Meanwhile, Murray Bloom, director of the counseling service, sees the proposed move as a chance to revive discussions of dovetailing some overlapping functions of the domestic and juvenile courts.

With attorney Shain Haug, he recently put forward a plan to give a single judge authority to resolve conflicting orders from the two courts on child custody issues. In Bloom’s version of Family Court, costly duplications of services could be eliminated, and children would have to testify less often about abuse and molestation.

Overall, according to Bloom, kids could be better protected by a court system no longer at odds with itself. “Without better coordination, it’s very possible cases might slip through the cracks,” he said.

The history of family court reform in San Diego County suggests both plans may face an uphill fight to win acceptance by the Superior Court judges.

Until mid-1977, all divorce issues in San Diego were assigned to a single judge. The court faced up to the accelerating pace of dissolutions by adding first a second and then a third domestic court judge. But the domestic departments also were assigned new, time-consuming tasks, including a calendar of interstate child-support cases that used to be heard in Municipal Court.

About five years ago, the Superior Court considered establishing a Family Court of interested judges--similar to the bar committee proposal--and locating it at the Juvenile Court facility in Linda Vista. But divorce attorneys, worried that the plan did not provide enough domestic judges, split on the proposal and the judges voted it down.

The result is the current logjam on the third floor of the downtown courthouse. Roughly 13,000 divorce cases are filed each year, according to court records, and the three domestic judges conduct more than 15,000 pre- and post-divorce hearings annually.

Court rules limit most hearings to 20 minutes. Attorneys who need more than 20 minutes but less than three hours to present their cases line up 50 or 60 strong on Friday mornings for assignment to a trial court. Once assigned, they often find themselves in a courtroom with four or five other pairs of lawyers whose cases also require two or three hours of the judge’s time, according to divorce attorney Martha Jones, chairman of the bar’s family law study section.

“It’s all sort of intended to make you settle it in the hallway if you can,” she said. “But you wouldn’t be there if you could.”

Cases expected to take longer than three hours go on a calendar with other civil cases. For those, the waiting time for assignment to a court can be as long as 18 months, although California law allows the couple to secure a dissolution before trial and leave economic and other issues until the court date.

The delays take a toll on divorcing men and women. “Maybe some of the cases that go onto that long civil calendar can wait it out,” Jones said last week. “But people in a divorce situation start playing games, and in a year and a half, somebody can incredibly alter the financial picture.”

Navy Lt. Cmdr. Peter MacDonald is still stinging from--and paying for--his encounter last spring with San Diego’s overcrowded divorce courts.

MacDonald paced the court hallways for two days--paying Jones, his lawyer, more than $100 per hour--while the judge assigned to his divorce case repeatedly was called away on emergency matters. The case finally got into court the following week, but MacDonald walked out and drove home to his new family in Monterey when the judge was pulled off to handle another case midway through the trial.

In his absence, the Navy officer was socked with a $600-per-month child-support order that he says doesn’t leave him money enough to buy groceries for his new home.

“I was enraged,” MacDonald said, “let alone so depressed I couldn’t see straight.”

Some judges agree with the domestic lawyers’ complaint that their clients receive second-class treatment from the courts.

“Domestic is sort of the stepchildren of the courts,” said Superior Court Judge Thomas Duffy, who court insiders predict will be elected presiding judge later this year. “Though the domestic relations department probably affects the lives of more responsible citizens than any other portion of the courts, it (is) something that was pushed aside.”

But Presiding Judge Donald Smith noted that every court case must bide its time in San Diego County--which, with 49 Superior Court judges and three referees, is 23 judges short of the minimum deemed necessary by the state Judicial Council.

“I’m sure every section of the bar--criminal, civil, whatever--feels that, to some extent, in priorities they are stepchildren,” Smith said. “I don’t think they are. We just can’t devote manpower or woman-power to the degree each lawyer would like, so their matter can be handled with no problems at all.”

Smith said last week that he was unprepared to commit his support to any of the domestic court reform proposals. But Murphy, a former divorce lawyer who now is supervising judge of the three domestic courts, said he was hopeful the Superior Court judges would consider the Family Court concept and the addition of one or more judges to the domestic bench once county supervisors approve the Burnham Building lease.

Divorce lawyers, meantime, plan a lobbying barrage to advance their plan. They are drafting a written version of the proposal, Alford said, and intend to buttonhole judges considered sympathetic to domestic court problems. They probably will ask that the domestic bench be boosted to five judges, he said.

“The presiding judge has told us on numerous occasions that there’s simply no way that’s going to happen,” Alford said. “I can understand where he’s coming from. But we’re of the opinion it has to happen.”

The lawyers may not be above putting pressure on the court. Some attorneys who serve as pro tem judges, hearing cases to lighten the domestic judges’ burden, are talking about quitting unless the Superior Court faces up to divorcing couples’ needs.

“Some of those in my group are almost to the point of boycotting the system if we don’t get some assistance,” Alford said. “That’s maybe the ultimate threat.”