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Jesus H. Christ...
But of course the mother should always get custody.
DSmith, do you twist everything around to your personal hobby horse? In my state, mothers don't automatically get custody. If you live in a state where the default assumption is not joint custody, you have the power to either move, or change the system.
In Canada, the man is automatically brought to prison on any domestic complaint and he won't be released until he signs a confession.
Do you think men have any chance at custody?
Canada is run by the feminist movement. Discussion is not even an option unless when you agree with them!
It is still, at least in California and sadly, the preference of the court to place a child with the mother whenever her living circumstances render it at all possible. Better even, to some judges, for a child to be with its mother in a homeless shelter than with its (sane, employed and non-drug using) father in an apartment or house. I used to volunteer as a court-appointed special advocate for children in the system, and I've seen that happen when it made no sense on the ground, just because child + mother = some judge's idea of an ideal family.
Face it, some people should just never reproduce.
and why didn't the father go to the apartment sooner than 19 days if he'd been trying to reach the mother for so long?
...i spent 17 years in law, 7.5 in the criminal justice system. what some parents do to their children is far worse than you can begin to imagine or than this article describes. while it doesn't excuse it, this child was not being beaten or tortured. many tiny children and infants are. and it's a daily thing.
in every set of circumstances, these violated children had neighbors. some hearing the screams simply ignore it because it is 'not their business'. screams are everyone's business. and we have an obligation to be involved in the lives of children who are our neighbors.
... the final straw for me... was the mother who tied a pink electrical cord around one toddler's neck and a yellow one around the other child. my son had just died ... i couldn't handle seeing and hearing any more. inspite of that, i still firmly believe that EVERYONE should spend time working in some capacity in the criminal justice system.
why? because most of us don't understand what's involved or what goes on under our noses in our own community. maybe if our eyes were forced open, fewer children would suffer.
where were the neighbors in this apartment building during that 19 days? you can't tell me no one heard that child cry and never heard a mother's response. you can't tell me the walls in that building were so thick that nothing was audible in any other apartment. shame. shame on the mother. but shame on her neighbors too.