This Morning

I was in a foul mood last night. I think I decided it was anger stemming from being hurt and having some things sink in. I wrote the last post after getting upset at the idea of who had maybe been close to my family but encouraged them against me, to think I was mentally ill, or whatever. So it was a combination.

Then, I tried to watch this movie and it's the first time I couldn't get through one. It was called "The Interrogation of Michael Crow". It was a CourtTV movie, about a boy who ends up being interrogated and jailed for a year after his sister is killed. The system works against him, thinking he, the 14 yr. old, is guilty and his whole family suffers twice.

I would like to think I could be a lawyer to help kids like this, but what I realized was that I had more PTSD with watching this than any other movie so far. I couldn't take it. I couldn't take seeing the boy suffer.

First of all, it helped me to see what families go through that lose a loved family member and I was sort of shocked to see the idea played out--how in crimes, police get involved and the tragedy is compounded with having to be interrogated. And then seeing what they did to this boy made me feel like I was about to hyperventilate. CPS comes in and separates the kids from the parents in a time of tragedy and everything. I didn't last long after that. I wanted to know what the end was but couldn't handle watching this and knowing it was real, that this wasn't an imaginary thing that happens to people. So I fastforwarded and got to the part where they say to eachother, "Now we know we have to do something different. We can't talk to the cops." and then later they say how if they can't go to the police for help, who do they go to? And then it ends with the kid getting the charges dismissed with prejudice or without prejudice, to allow someone to file later if they want, and it's just to save face. So the family talks about moving on and in the end, the mother is barely holding together and they file a lawsuit against the State, and against the AG offices (Attorney General) and by the time of the filming, the lawsuit was still pending.

So I'll have to look it up and see what happened.

But I thought, "If I had to be a lawyer for kids going through this kind of thing, I'd feel driven to drink, or depressed all the time, or traumatized."

Before, such a movie could have inspired me to fight for kid's rights and civil rights. Last night, watching it totally triggered my own trauma and made me think about what my son has been through and what people who lose family members through crime go through. And I realized why, for the first time, sometimes those members just want to move on, because it's too painful and evokes PTSD to deal with it.

The legal focus is about coerced confessions. And there was a good point, at the end, about requiring videotaping rather than paper documentation of meetings, visits, interrogations...the point being that because the visits were videotaped, Crow was exonnerated rightfully because everyone could see what was done, but if it had been written documentation, it would just be someone's word against his and he would have lost and been perhaps wrongly convicted of a crime he never committed. Because things were videotaped, the State was not able to get away with corruption.

Which made me think about what happened with my CPS case and how the very same thing happened there. I was refused the right to have objective videotaping of our visits done and if it had been done, NONE of this would have happened. Some of the most incredible lies, at every single visit, were written down.

Those visitation monitors perjured themselves and then I was refused the right to cross-examine these so-called "witnesses" at Termination trial, even though I repeatedly asked.

I can't imagine a better feeling of reward than to defend kids from things like this, but I do not believe I could do it. Which is why, maybe, some of these lawyers don't even put themselves in the same room as their client or the kid whose parent they are supposedly defending. They can't handle the truth. Everyone, like the characters in a russian novel, has elements of good and bad and some of these lawyers would rather skip over the part where they must, as ethics would require, come face-to-face with reality. They can't handle the guilt, some of them. They already decided what they're going to do and know they're playing games and screwing over a kid's life. They don't want to be reminded of what a lousy person they are, by having to look the kid in the eye. And then I guess some look a kid in the eye and still have no problem with screwing the kid over because they made up their minds already about what will benefit them.

The point of the movie is this:

They didn't want the truth. They wanted him to confess.

Which is exactly what was done in Wenatchee. They wanted me to admit to being mentally ill and knew what the truth was and went to great extremes to conceal the truth and get what they wanted.