Comment #: DC451
Rating:Not Rated
Comments:
Judge Smith is not the worst family court judge, but extremely bad. She ignores jurisdictional requirements to bringing divorce actions, permits a significant percentage of child custody cases to go to trial (while the best family court judges facilitate amicable resolution, insist on and order, if necessary, inter-parent communication and mediation of all issues, and will aggressively deter the use of adversarial methods of dispute resolution). Judge Smith will remove mediation, sua sponte, from an intra-family or child custody/access case (even though litigation is known to be generally extremely harmful to children in such cases), orders open-ended custody evaluations in almost all contested custody cases, even where the evaluator is retained by the plaintiff's counsel, requires the defendant to list their witnesses first, makes rulings based on ex parte communications, hearsay and vague innuendo, orders permanent supervised visits without a given reason (and no hearing date to review this form of torture), enters hundreds of orders in a single child custody case, after removing mediation from the schedule, even when the parents wish to mediate, blocks IFP defendants on appeal from obtaining transcripts, takes a year after trial to enter rulings, will modify orders appealed to try to muck up appeals of her rulings, and is generally a threat to young children, vulnerable parents in flux, and to public health and safety, and to the well-being of young, vulnerable children and parents in flux. Shame on the court for not supervising such conduct.

Comment #: DC410
Rating:8.6
Comments:
Judge Smith continues to improve. She was taking too long to issue her rulings but she is doing so with more dispatch. Her rulings have always been well-reasoned