032: From Advocacy to Law: Tom Alongi & Patricia Madsen on The Alec & Lydia Act| Part 2

I wanted to ask about the, I love every part of the bill, obviously, and it was a part of my story.

That's why I'm so glad that it's in my children's legacy.

But the main sticking point for me was making sure that judges were held accountable in some sense.

with writing their findings in temporary orders.

Because after my children died, everybody asked, you know, why aren't you suing the judge? Why aren't you suing the judge or the courts? Because they have 100% immunity.

So I wanted to find a way to make sure that we could hold them accountable in a statute way.

So can you explain why that's so important?

I think that the temporary orders issue is one of the big issues to me, I think, the lack of findings in temporary orders.

And we have a lot of clients coming through, and we do a lot of assisting people who are representing themselves at community legal services.

And so just the numbers of people who would ask for temporary orders hearing, you know, temporary orders theoretically would be a good thing, right? At least there are rules for people to follow rather than no rules.

But consistently, people would walk out of court after a very, very short hearing with 50-50 parenting time and joint legal decision-making, and the judge either didn't hear any evidence about domestic violence or certainly didn't acknowledge any evidence about domestic violence.

So...

People would receive their minute entries, their court orders from the temporary orders hearings, and there would be a whole lot of explanation about citing case law that judges don't have to make findings on temporary orders.

So you'd spend a page and a half explaining why they didn't have to make findings, which is super frustrating for anyone receiving those orders and also not good for anyone receiving those orders because not addressing issues that are raised in temporary orders is a problem.

And having no record of that, having no idea of what the judge considered, what the judge didn't consider in temporary orders, as part of the purpose of temporary orders is to kind of set things up for final orders.

You know, what's changed? What's different for final orders from the temporary orders? If you don't know what was important at temporary orders, you're not going to know what's important in the final orders, what to really concentrate on there.

So I just inferred everybody in that kind of circumstance, I think that requiring those written findings is a good thing as far as litigants go, for sure.

I know judges

aren't happy about it.

I know that by and large, and I don't want to just talk about judges as a whole monolith, but a lot of judges are maybe concerned that that's going to take extra time to issue orders and things like that.

From my perspective, the orders are going to be better.

So waiting extra time for orders that are are better because you have an idea that the judge considered the evidence.

They've documented what they considered.

They've documented what they didn't consider, basically.

They've documented why they made their orders.