November 13, 2026
There is a court above the Mendocino County Superior Court. It is the California Court of Appeal, First Appellate District, in San Francisco. Its job, when a trial judge does something the law does not allow, is to look. I have asked it to look four times since September. This evening it answered the fourth time the way it answered the other three: one sentence, no reasons, no hearing, nobody from the other side ever asked to respond.
I want this written down somewhere that is not a docket, because dockets are where things go to be forgotten.
What it was asked
September, A177556. I asked the court to decide which custody order governs my son: the one made on February 11, 2026, after notice and a contested hearing, giving me sole physical custody and allowing us to live in Florida; or the one signed on August 12, 2026, without notice to me, with the findings of harm left blank, which by its own printed terms expired at the hearing of September 2 “unless extended by court order.” The minutes of September 2 record no extension. On September 23 the court itself directed the parties to address exactly that question: which orders govern, when they expire, and what governs when they do. Then, on October 6, it denied the petition without answering its own question. No opposition had been filed.
October, A177795. Denied on October 14. One line.
October 18, A177840. A petition for a writ of habeas corpus — the oldest remedy there is for a person being held without lawful authority — on behalf of a two-year-old, with a 385-page record. It laid out the order he was taken on, the order that governs, the expiration, the after-the-fact “extension” the Mendocino judge signed on October 15 from a draft written by the other side’s lawyer the day after she swore under penalty of perjury that she was not asking for any such thing. Nobody opposed it. Nobody was asked to. On November 2 the court denied it in a single sentence.
November 10, A178060. On November 3 I served the Mendocino judge with a verified statement asking that he be disqualified. The law says a judge who is challenged that way does not get to rule on the challenge himself. On November 9 he struck it himself. I asked the Court of Appeal to say that he could not do that. Today, November 13, it denied the petition. One line.
What that means, in plain words
Four petitions. Not one of them was answered on the merits. Not one of them drew an opposition, because the court never asked for one. The court’s own September 23 order shows it understood the question — which order governs a child’s life — and it has declined to answer it ever since.
I am not a lawyer. I am a mother representing myself, and I have been told, by people who are lawyers, that summary denials are ordinary and that a court is “allowed” to refuse. I understand that. I am writing this down anyway, because there is a difference between a court that may refuse and a court that should have looked, and a two-year-old who has been held since August 19 on a draft marked “Proposed” is on the wrong side of that difference.
The only custody order in this case made after notice and a hearing has never been questioned by any court, anywhere. It has been registered in Florida and confirmed there without objection. It has simply not been enforced, by anyone, in either state. The court above Mendocino has now told me four times that it will not be the one.
So it will be someone else. The record is finished, it is public, and it names every office and every court that was asked and what each one did. That is what this site is for.