Judge Robert McBurney, Fulton County Superior Court. Credit: John Disney/ALM

Fulton County Superior Court Chief Judge Robert McBurney blasted critics of a survey seeking input on the operations of the court's Family Division as peddling an “alarmist” misinterpretation of the exercise.

Those critics, including attorneys, ministers and a Fulton County commissioner, on Friday released a statement expressing “strenuous opposition to the clandestine attempt by some lawyers and some judges” to “dismantle the Fulton Family Division and to revert to the practice of handling Family Law cases utilized years ago.”

But McBurney said the survey was a routine effort to monitor the court's effectiveness, and dismissed rumors that there was any plan to abolish the Family Division.

“There's a smart plan in place to gather information about the court,” McBurney said Friday. “It's a shame that some people have mischaracterized it. The Family Division is very much alive; whether it is alive and well is a matter for debate.”

McBurney said he and his fellow judges recently asked the family law sections of the State Bar of Georgia and the Atlanta Bar Association to circulate the online survey to their members.

The survey asked respondents to rate whether the division improved or declined over the last five years and whether they support doing away with it and returning its duties to all 20 judges, among other questions.  

“We wanted to get some feedback: 'How are we doing? What can we do differently? What can we do better,'” McBurney said. “It's an unremarkable event aimed at improving performance.”

Not everyone saw it as such, including the coalition that sought to sound an alarm about the survey.

The survey's critics said that before the Family Division's creation in 1998, family court cases were assigned to all the court's judges, just as civil and criminal cases are, and “family law cases took bottom rung priority in granting hearings on child support, child custody, pressing immediate matters of protective hearings, and the like. Many of the judges were ill-equipped to handle family matters and had an obvious distaste for handling family law cases.”

“Fast forward to today, the motivation of some lawyers and some ill-informed judges who may lack the historical perspective[] is to seek to dismantle the Family Division and to reverse the clock,” said the statement.

Among its signatories are former Superior Court Judge Thelma Wyatt Moore; Fulton County Commissioner Marvin Arrington Jr.; Rev. Gerald Durley; Rev. Timothy McDonald and attorneys George O. Lawson, Janise Miller, Susan Ockleberry and Antavious Weems.

Moore, who retired in 2008, said she well remembered the days before the division's creation.

“When I first came to the Superior Court bench in 1990, we handled Family Division cases while criminal cases were being negotiated for pleas,” she said. “We needed people … who were trained in family law, and who received continuous training.”

Lawson said he has been a member of the bar's Family Law Section since its inception, but was unaware of the survey until another lawyer mentioned it to him.

“It was supposedly sent out to family practitioners, but I never got it,” he said.

Lawson said he'd spoken to McBurney about the survey to express his concerns.

“There are more pro se litigants in Family Court than in any other court expect Magistrate Court,” Lawson said. “I told Judge McBurney that families in crisis need immediate attention for things like child support, custody hearings. I don't understand the rationale for going back to the old way.”

“The answer is that this is nothing more than information-gathering,” McBurney said.

The responses are still being complied and afterward “we'll need to work through what we do with the results,” he said. “We're just excited because it seems like we're getting a lot of practitioners offering up their perspectives. We like to provide opportunities for the bar to respond to the bench.”