Meeting With IL Attorney General
Many of you are asking on how we, in IL, managed to get the IL Attorney General to open her doors. Persistence is the only word I can come up with. And knowing ahead of time the road blocks they'd throw up. While in the meeting, the AG's office stated, "it's not our jurisdiction". Carroll White stopped them in their tracts, this is how she summed it up.
Carroll White wrote:
I'm the culprit that dealt with the jurisdiction objection.
I did it pretty much as stated in the letter that you read. I surprised myself, actually. It's Constitution 101. We have three branches of government, none of which has jurisdiction over the other, but they have the power and duty to be a watch dog over each other. We call this "balance of power." I said, "You may not have jurisdiction, but you do have the ability to serve as a whistle blower when injustice occurs."
*** The AG may not have jurisdiction or authority over the family courts, but they do have a duty to the citizens of the state to blow the whistle on the use of family court as another tool of abuse against women. ***
I pointed out that the Atty Gen'l stepped in on a custody case in Illinois(Strelioff) -- we put the court papers in the appendix of our binder. I also pointed out that the Atty Gen'l endorsed a study on DV a couple of years ago. The study was conducted by DePaul Univ. law dept., and a law firm in Chicago, but the Atty Gen'l put her stamp of approval on it.
We suggested that she could do the same thing for us, using Loyola Univ. law (her alma mater), and Dr. Susan Weitzman of the Weitzman Center, who is all over this issue and on board to work with our local (225) cases.
When this Women's Policy Adviser in the Atty Genl's office heard me state all of these things on top of my handling of the jurisdiction response, she knew I knew what I was talking about and I was going to hold Lisa Madigan's hands to the fire politically.
We earned credibility in our presentation by citing specifically the laws that are being used to perpetrate this injustice. I was able to explain to them exactly how the evaluators and GALs in Illinois are unconstitutional -- "an inappropriate delegation of judicial power and authority." It's a quote I took from an attorney who I met on the street during a protest in Chicago last fall. He nailed it for me, and I've been using it ever since. That one concise phrase gets attention from attorneys. You have to speak their language. If they think you know the law, they can't brush you off with legal double speak anymore.
We also let them know that if they didn't do anything for us, we were headed to Senator Barak Obama's office next .... and the media. Carroll White
While all that was exciting to watch, more importantly the look on the policy advisers face was priceless. The whole meeting turned on the precise point, we had them!
Carroll White is preparing our presentation so others can utilize it their states. It's not that we did something others couldn't, we just organized our presentation in a way to make it bullet proof when shot at by attorney's and FR's group. She is working hard, as we speak, to accommodate all your requests.