Extracts from “Grounds For Divorce” – Davis and Murch
The following account sums up the experience of many.
(different case) – “She used unreasonable behaviour. There are some great things in there, mind. I was going to frame it [the petition]. People get divorced these days on things like this. Marriage doesn’t mean much these days. It says here, “the respondent has used foul and abusive language towards the petitioner by calling her names such as "cow". I find that really pathetic. I showed this to people, this article here, and they just laughed.
…. Now that argument was because I caught her with a bloke – she came out of his car—it doesn’t state that—that ‘my husband and I had argument because I got out of my boyfriend’s car’. I don’t know how they can write this and get away with it. A solicitor actually made this rubbish up and to me that’s downright disgusting.”
(different case) “The whole attitude with solicitors is that once a petition for divorce is entered on their books, the parties concerned are to be kept away from one another and not to do anything that may upset the two opposing solicitors from working the whole system to suit themselves and to work out ways and means of deciding on what’s best, and how to sort the matter out, and how to finalize it, irrespective of what the parties think. You get a solicitor advising you, ‘There’s your wife’s petition; we know it’s a load of rubbish but when this goes to court, she’ll be granted a divorce anyway—doesn’t matter what you say. Even if you fight it, she’ll automatically get a divorce because the courts automatically give them their divorces just to get the whole thing rubber-stamped and over with.’”
This is a clear illustration of the way in which our present law creates a problem, namely, a sense of injustice on the part of respondents faced with a ‘behaviour’ petition.
We end this chapter with a brief extract from the story of a middle-aged Jamaican man. He had arrived home one day to find his house denuded of all furniture (and his bank account similarly emptied, as it subsequently transpired), with a note from his wife saying that she was leaving. Two weeks later, he received a divorce petition, based on his unreasonable behaviour, which he took to a solicitor.
“She [the solicitor] said to me, ‘let it go through because it’s completely breakdown.’ But I said no, because if she want a divorce, she should say, ‘I commit adultery’ or something like that, but not run away and then say that I done all these dirty things, which never take place. All [the solicitor] wanted was to compromise, but I think she wasn’t acting properly as a solicitor. She was more trained just to work it out as one of those hard luck stories. I think that’s how she was thinking—just one of those hard luck stories. When [the solicitor] said to me, ‘let it go through because it doesn’t matter who’s right from who’s wrong’, I went to a friend and I said to him, ‘What do you think of this?’ And he said, ‘Well, why should she done it and you take that lying down?’ And I said, ‘That’s just the way I think of it.’”
Why should anybody be forced to put up with this?
I challenge any judge, solicitor, barrister or politician to justify the moral or ethical basis for the above attitudes and behaviour of the legal profession.