PressReader.com | High Court finds judge ‘hos­tile’ to mother and lim­its role of experts | Ireland

A LANDMARK High Court judge­ment has ruled that court-appoin­ted experts can­not par­ti­cip­ate in judi­cial decision-mak­ing.

It comes after a judi­cial review into a cus­tody hear­ing last year found the bound­ary between expert evid­ence and the judi­cial func­tion was not main­tained.

In his rul­ing, Judge Gar­rett Simons also cri­ti­cised the ‘fun­da­ment­ally flawed’ hear­ing over­seen by the Dis­trict Court judge in the case.

J u d g e S t e p h a n i e Cog­gans h a d threatened to trans­fer cus­tody of the child from her mother to her father, who was alleged to have put his hands around his daugh­ter’s throat.

The High Court found the judge used ‘intem­per­ate and vul­gar lan­guage’ towards the mother – who alleged there was a his­tory of coer­cive con­trol and domestic viol­ence – dur­ing the hear­ing.

It also cri­ti­cised the role of the court-appoin­ted expert in the case, who was ‘invited to move bey­ond the role of a wit­ness’.

The judge­ment delivered this month over­turned the Dis­trict Court dir­ec­tions to resume access between the girl, who is now 14, and her father. It also rein­stated a pro­tec­tion order the mother had secured against the father.

Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘It was a forensic ana­lysis of what the law is and how it should be imple­men­ted and that hasn’t happened before.’ They said the judge­ment also high­lights where the secret ‘in-cam­era’ rule ‘really fails’.

‘The in-cam­era rule can be jus­ti­fied on lots of grounds – pri­vacy and pro­tec­tion of kids. But there is no way a judge would speak in this man­ner in open court,’ they added.

The MoS has repeatedly raised con­cerns over the use of expert wit­nesses in fam­ily law pro­ceed­ings and the ‘in-cam­era’ rule where pro­ceed­ings are held in private.

The rela­tion­ship between the par­ents has been marked by con­flict. The mother has accused her former part­ner of a his­tory of domestic abuse and coer­cive con­trol. The father denies alleg­a­tions but acknow­ledges he has been con­victed of a series of breaches of a safety order after he sent threat­en­ing mes­sages to the mother. The mother claims her daugh­ter made sep­ar­ate alleg­a­tions against her father, which he denies, includ­ing that he put his hands around the child’s throat.

Des­pite the alleg­a­tions, Judge Cog­gans ordered that access vis­its between the child and her father should resume. She also dis­charged a pre­vi­ous pro­tec­tion order made for the bene­fit of the mother. The mother was told to take the child to the father’s home, and the father was to return the child to the mother’s home.

However, Judge Simons over­turned Judge Cog­gans’s rul­ing.

In his highly crit­ical judge­ment, he found orders had been made without the court hear­ing the child’s up-to-date views, now a ‘fun­da­mental require­ment’ in fam­ily law cases. He also found Judge Cog­gans made a series of pre­ma­ture assump­tions that were all hos­tile to the mother.

It found Judge Cog­gans had expressed con­clu­sions and indic­ated future out­comes ‘before the evid­en­tial pro­cess had been com­pleted’. It also found the court-appoin­ted expert was per­mit­ted to move bey­ond the role of a wit­ness.

It noted the wit­ness was invited to par­ti­cip­ate as a co-assessor with the judge while the mother was denied an oppor­tun­ity to cross-exam­ine.

The Right To Trans­par­ency advocacy group this week­end described the High Court rul­ing as ‘sig­ni­fic­ant’.

[Ed: This pattern of conduct by Judges and expert witnesses involved in family law cases is a global problem.]

Source: PressReader.com | High Court finds judge ‘hos­tile’ to mother and lim­its role of experts