Playing Racial/Religion Discrimination Card And Attacking Opposing Counsel/The Court Did Not “Play” Well For Ex-Husband In Bitter Custody Dispute.
Well, this next case – Marriage of Salas and Farraj, Case No. B252053 (2d Dist., Div. 7 Sept. 1, 2015) (unpublished) – is a good lesson for family law practitioners to not play the discrimination card or to attack opposing counsel/the court even if the client insists on it. The upshot may well be client exposure for Family Code section 271 sanctions which frustrate efforts to settle or to informally resolve normally contentious dissolution matters.
In this one, ex-husband got in a bitter custody/visitation dispute after his ex-wife and child moved to India. Emotions obviously raged, but ex-husband apparently played the racial/religious discrimination card, engaged in lots of discovery disputes, and attacked ex-wife’s counsel/the court.
The lower court eventually awarded postjudgment discovery sanctions against ex-husband as well as substantial 217 sanctions of $123,087.50.
Most of it got affirmed on appeal, or will be after a remand.
Even though a litigant cannot aggregate discovery sanctions to meet the $5,000 appealability threshold, the nuance here was that this was a postjudgment award which is expressly appealable.
On the 271 sanctions, there was a remand because the lower court did draw a “time demarcation” line, finding efforts on attacking a psychiatric report and initially challenging the move-away order were not sanctionable in nature. However, because the time demarcation was not firmly taken into account, the sanctions had to be revisited in a post-remand proceeding.