Some of the fundamental premises of conscience and morality are that: 1) being honest is right, 2) being dishonest is wrong, and 3) promoting dishonesty is wrong and immoral.

Fair and conscientious behavior gets established in early childhood and involves the activation of reasoning and emotion pathways in the prefrontal cortex[1]. The honest people value the truth and the law that is based on morality and also believe that the truth and the law matter in the trial court. That’s why the honest people choose to be honest, choose not to break the law intentionally, try to learn the law, and come to the trial court to achieve justice.

Honest people believe that a trial judge will resolve their legal problem and, thus, elevate their suffering as much as they believe that a doctor will resolve their health problem and elevate their physical pain.

The honest people work and earn the market rate income for their services, unless the honest people are independently wealthy as a result of inheritance, prior achievements, prior investments, or luck. The vast majority of Californians (over 90%) earns less than $100,000 per year before taxes and cannot afford to pay over $50,000 for continuous legal representation and become self-represented litigants at some time during the litigation (see argument on web page Democracy in California is Moneycracy).

The dishonest people, on the other hand, know that in the trial court the truth and the law are irrelevant, and what matters is the influence of their attorney. That’s why the dishonest people steal, lie, and intentionally violate the law, so they can have enough money to hire an influential attorney. The more skilled at dishonesty the person is, the more likely he/she will steal and/or fraudulently obtain enough money to have continuous representation. As a result, almost all wily dishonest people are represented and the vast majority of their victims, the honest people, are self-represented.

Attorneys need to make the living, and their long-term customers are the dishonest people. The “good” attorney is the one who wins the case for his/her customer. Attorneys need to win their cases to maintain their “good” reputation. Therefore, attorneys need to win cases for the dishonest people. The only way to do so for an attorney is to support and advocate the position of their dishonest customers, which necessary forces attorneys to be dishonest themselves.

The dishonest and money-seeking attorneys have a direct conflict of interest with the honest and self-represented litigants. Consequently, attorneys are biased against the honest and self-represented litigants. 

All California judges are former lawyers with at least 10 years of experience, members of the California State Bar, as required by the California Constitution, Article 6, section 15.

Therefore, the vast majority of the California trial judges were practicing attorneys immediately prior to becoming judges. As a result, the vast majority of the California trial judges have a strong inherent and most of the times implicit bias against the honest and self-represented litigants.

 To justify mistreatment of self-represented litigants, the trial judges, like abusive parents, project their own incompetence and dishonesty onto honest self-represented litigants.[2]

The California trial judges do not have any motivation to maintain their competence in the ever-changing codes, assuming they had such competence when they became the judges. Trial judges don’t have to take tests checking their knowledge of the law. If a trial judge makes an error, whether this error is procedural or substantive, any error is presumed “harmless” (according to the Code of Civil Procedure section 475), and an incorrect ruling or judgment cannot be set aside unless the court finds that the ruling resulted in a “miscarriage of justice” (according to the California Constitution, Article 6, section 13).

As we learned through our own experience and experience of other self-represented divorcing spouses, trial judges do whatever they want regardless of the law, and they have an absolute power because they are covered by the principle of “Judicial Immunity”, which in reality is Judicial Impunity. Although the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court have authority to reverse the decisions of the trial judges, neither the Court of Appeal, nor the Supreme Court have manpower and, thus, physical ability to review all filed cases.

So why would a trial judge bother to waste his/her precious time to learn the law when he/she is: 1) not responsible for the consequences of his/her ignorance of the law and 2) not rewarded for the competence in the law?

The lack of motivation inevitably leads to the lack of competence. Consequently, an incompetent trial judge will always choose the version or interpretation of the law provided by an attorney versus the reading of the statutory and case law provided by a self-represented litigant.

Naturally, all judges see themselves as a social group as they all belong to the California Judges Association. Human wisdom is stated in the proverb: “Birds of a feather flock together

Research in psychology shows that the more power a group or a particular person has, the more likely that powerful group or person will abuse that power and intentionally inflict pain and suffering on powerless group or person.[3] Research in neuroscience shows that, like cocaine, aggressive behavior and inflicting pain on someone increase the levels of dopamine and, therefore, create a feeling of pleasure and reward.[4] Addictive behaviors get established throughout lifetime and involve the activation of pleasure and reward pathways in ventral tegmental area and nucleus accumbens.[5]

Family law judges have practically absolute power in the trial courts. There is no jury in the family law courts, thus, the trial judges have ample opportunity to satisfy their dopamine cravings by mistreating self-represented spouses. Within a short period of time, as with any drug or activity which stimulates the pleasure and reward centers in the brain, the mistreatment of self-represented litigants becomes an addiction and an absolutely necessary behavior for the family law judges. In summary, for the family law judges, mistreatment of self-represented spouses becomes what a drug-fix is for cocaine addicts.

It is likely that the trial court judges do not see the mistreatment of self-represented litigants as immoral and unconscionable, as their perceptions of morality and conscience were necessarily changed by their own addiction to abusive behavior and by the lack of punishment.

The inhumane treatment from the trial judges comes almost naturally because collectively the California judges stereotyped, dehumanized, and objectified people who cannot afford an attorney as a “Self-Represented Litigant”.

The California judges created commissions and task forces to minimize the impact of the annoying and disturbing “self-represented litigants” on the court system. Characteristically, none of the many created commissions and task forces with the bright names such as “Fair Administration of Justice” or “To Improve Fairness and Efficiency in California Family Law Cases” has appointed members who have experience being those self-represented litigants in California family law cases or who are psychologists or psychiatrists treating those self-represented litigants after they were intimidated, humiliated, denigrated, and psychologically abused by the trial judges.

The very absence of the self-represented litigants or psychologists or psychiatrists in such commissions conclusively proves that, to California judges and the court system, the “self-represented litigants” are non-humans, and, therefore, their opinions or feelings are irrelevant.

Judges as a group perceive “Self-Represented Litigants” as a force imposing a huge burden and, therefore, threat upon the court system. “The most atrocities occur when people believe they are acting nobly to defend a threatening enemy”[6]. When California judges as a group stereotype millions of Californians as “Self-Represented Litigants”, then people at every level of the judicial group “help to foster a collective culture of hate and are responsible for its consequences”[7].

When an honest and conscientious trial judge becomes shocked by the outrageous lies or aggressive and life-threatening behavior of a represented party and acts honestly and humanely toward a self-represented party, the court system punishes such a trial judge for being honest, conscientious, and humane by removing the honest and conscientious judge from the office and publishing such stories as examples of “inappropriate” judicial behavior in the official guidelines[8], [9], [10].

The official guidelines also cited cases in which judges were censured for being cruel and demeaning toward self-represented litigants[11]. Apparently, being honest and conscientious for a trial judge is worse than being cruel and demeaning toward a self-represented litigant. Not surprisingly, most trial judges treat self-represented litigants with ignorance, disrespect, intimidation, and plain cruelty and abuse.

The highest judges of the State of California, would anyone of you like to come to a doctor in hopes of finding a cure  for you health problem and a relief from your pain only to find out  that the doctor stereotypes you as an annoying liar and a drunk who wastes the doctor’s time?

How would you feel if that doctor ignores what you say about your symptoms and, instead, gives you a medicine that causes you more pain? How would you feel if that doctor keeps causing you suffering until you give up and say that you are a liar and a drunk? You will never want to see that doctor again. At least, any normal person would and, probably, can find a competent and conscientious doctor. Not so with a judge. A self-represented party gets assigned to a trial judge and has no choice, even when that trial judge is incompetent, prejudiced, and antisocial.

            Most trial judges will not admit that they are biased against self-represented litigants. When such bias is implicit, it affects people’s decisions in exercise of power: people who exhibit implicit bias toward another group tend to deny that group financial resources, employment, and even live-saving medications.

Like judges who do not acknowledge their bias against self-represented parties, “most physicians did not acknowledge racial bias, but on average they showed (on an implicit bias test) a moderate to large implicit anti-black bias. And the greater a physician’s racial bias, the less likely he or she was to give a black patient … the [life-saving] thrombolytic drugs.” [12]

It is terrible that the immoral and inhumane behavior of the trial judges remains unknown because most of the time hundreds of thousand of self-represented litigants are so terrified and mentally crashed that they become consumed by the fear of retaliation, “learned helplessness”, and withdrawal and do not report judicial abuse.

            What is more horrifying is that even when self-represented litigants report abusive behavior of the trial judges to the Commission on Judicial Performance, their complaints are being ignored because the Commission is understaffed and physically unable to review all complaints.

            According to the Commission’s official web site, there is only one person who is processing new complaints. Five out of 11 members of the Commission on Judicial Performance are judges themselves, 6 are influential people who never had an experience of being self-represented before a trial judge. Finally, only 2-4% of complaints result in any sanctions, and almost all “sanctions” are just private letters to the judges. Conclusively, the Commission on Judicial Performance is a dysfunctional sham.

Due to the absolute monopoly of the State Bar of California, a public corporation, on the legal representation and the practice of law in California, the members of the State Bar can uncontrollably charge unreasonable, unconscionable, and exorbitant rates for their services, most of the time 16 times greater than the median hourly income of Californians.[13]

The State Bar reports that the ratio of poor people to legal aid attorneys in California is 10,000 to 1.[14]

The Association of Certified Family Law Specialists stated in 2007 that there was “the ever-widening two-tiered justice system -- that for litigants who can afford to opt out of the public court system and retain private judges who do not impose unreasonable and arbitrary deadlines and that for those who cannot afford to do so.”[15] As self-represented litigants, we learned from our own experience that California of today is the land of two classes: the high class of people who can afford continuous representation by influential attorneys at the rate of over $300 per hour and the low class of those who cannot afford continuous representation.

For the “self-represented” class or over 90% of Californians, the California laws are simply unenforceable and the phrase “equal access to justice” is a profound lie. In California of today, there is an equal access to a trial judge, and not to justice. Consequently, the members of the “self-represented” class have no practical property rights as their property can easily be taken from them against their will by a trial judge at the request of a represented party.  

            Since being self-represented means being subjected to bullying, denigration, humiliation and psychological abuse, being self-represented is actually worse than non-appearing in court. The vast majority of the surveyed self-represented litigants reported that being in the courtroom was extremely distressing, horrifying, and even the worst experience in their lives.[16]

            The psychological traumas resulting from the judicial abuse cause severe brain diseases in self-represented litigants such as anxiety, depression, panic attacks, and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Undoubtedly, the trial judges actively support the legal profession by conveying the message that the only way to survive the litigation is to be represented.

In summary, in the trial court, the honest self-represented people learn the reality that the truth and the law are irrelevant and lose their cases against the dishonest people.

The legal remedy of the appeal is available to the self-represented litigants only in theory. Because self-represented litigants are almost NEVER legally-experienced[17] and always have brain malfunctioning due to emotional involvement, distress, and high anxiety caused either by litigation itself or unfair rulings of the trial court, it is physically impossible for self-represented litigants to prepare good-quality briefs for an appeal in 2-3 months.

We could not find a single published case in which the prevailing party was a self-represented non-lawyer in the Court of Appeal. If anyone knows of such a case, please let us know, and we will post it on www.SelfRepresentedFool.org .

As the final result, the California legal system discourages the honesty and encourages the dishonesty. Thus, the California legal system is immoral.

An immoral legal system inevitably defends itself by suppressing and punishing those who have enough courage to tell the truth. The more immoral the system is, the more intimidating, cruel, and inhumane the punishment is. The California legal system degraded to torturing self-represented litigants like Dr. Sidiakina who dare to disagree, speak up, and tell the truth. The current California legal system is not much different from the Stalin’s or Hitler’s legal systems.