A documented investigation into the accountability gap at the center of Maryland’s family court system — the closed loop between judges, bar associations, and the private ADR industry that profits when courts fail.
By Michael Phillips | Riptide Investigations | Father & Co.
The Question No One Can Answer
In the spring of 2024, after months of documented denials of court-ordered parenting time, a father filed a civil rights complaint with the Maryland Commission on Civil Rights. He had documentation. He had timestamps. He had 7,077 messages on a court-designated co-parenting platform showing a consistent pattern of noncompliance with a standing court order. He had a docket showing 119 documented motions, petitions, and requests filed across 21 judges — virtually all denied, dismissed, deferred, or simply never ruled upon. Emergency custody requests were dismissed without hearings. ADA accommodation requests were ignored for 16 consecutive months. Hearings were canceled without notice. And in nearly three years of active litigation, the proceedings were conducted almost entirely on paper — without hearings, without trial, without any oral proceeding at which a judge’s reasoning could be observed, tested, or appealed.
The Maryland Commission on Civil Rights reviewed his complaint. Then it told him what it tells everyone in his situation: it does not have jurisdiction over the courts.
That answer — technically accurate, structurally devastating — is the subject of this investigation.
Because if the MCCR cannot receive civil rights complaints against judges, and the Commission on Judicial Disabilities seals all complaint records and handles conduct rather than civil rights, and the Maryland Judiciary’s own ADA grievance process routes complaints back to the institution being complained about, and the Judiciary’s Access to Justice office says it cannot review judicial decisions, and Disability Rights Maryland declines citing its policy against family law cases, and appeals to higher courts within the same system are dismissed — then the question is not what happened in one man’s custody case. The question is what happens to everyone in his situation.
The answer, documented entirely through public records, is nothing. And the system is designed that way.
Part One: The Accountability Gap
Maryland has no external civil rights enforcement body with jurisdiction over its judiciary.
This is not a gap that advocates are quietly trying to close. It is a structural feature of how the system is organized, and it operates with the full knowledge of every institution involved.
The Maryland Commission on Civil Rights is charged with enforcing the state’s anti-discrimination laws in employment, housing, public accommodations, and state contracts. Courts are none of those things. When a litigant files a complaint alleging that a court denied ADA accommodations, treated a self-represented litigant differently from represented parties, or failed to enforce orders in ways that suggest differential treatment — the MCCR’s intake unit evaluates whether the complaint falls under MCCR’s jurisdiction. Family court does not. The complaint is aborted. The MCCR’s own intake documentation confirms this process explicitly. In the case documented here, the complainant underwent a full intake interview, filed a formal charge on October 2, 2024 — dual-filed with the EEOC as Charge No. 12F-2024-01471 — and was told by phone several months later that the commission could not proceed against the courts. His only remedy, he was told, was to file a complaint with the courts themselves. He had already done that. Multiple times. Those complaints went nowhere.
The Commission on Judicial Disabilities exists to receive complaints against judges. Its mandate is conduct — disability, misconduct, incapacity. It is not a civil rights enforcement body. More significantly, every complaint filed with the Commission on Judicial Disabilities is sealed. The public has no way to know how many complaints have been filed against any judge, what they alleged, whether they were investigated, or why they were dismissed. A litigant who files a complaint cannot obtain a record of what happened to it. The institution operates entirely outside public accountability.
The Maryland Judiciary maintains its own ADA grievance process — form CC-DC-050, submitted to the courthouse where the denial occurred. The ADA Coordinator who receives the form works for the same judiciary whose judge denied the accommodation. There is no independent review. The grievance routes back to the institution.
The Maryland Judiciary’s Access to Justice office — housed at the Administrative Office of the Courts in Annapolis — is a fourth internal mechanism that produces the same result. When the complainant documented in this investigation contacted the office in November 2024, the response acknowledged the limitations of the office in providing legal advice or overturning judicial decisions. His reply was precise: his concern was not legal advice or a review of rulings. It was systemic discrimination and a failure to provide legally required accommodations. The Access to Justice office did not have a mechanism to address that either.
Disability Rights Maryland, the state’s federally designated protection and advocacy organization for people with disabilities, opened an intake in late October 2024 after being contacted by the complainant. Staff attorney Daria Pugh requested documentation and reviewed the materials. DRM ultimately declined to take action, citing its policy of avoiding family law matters — the same limitation cited by every legal aid organization, domestic violence resource, and advocacy group the complainant had contacted over the prior four years.
The U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division does have jurisdiction over state courts under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits discrimination by state and local government entities. Title II provides the one external mechanism with actual authority. A formal complaint was filed on October 16, 2024. The DOJ Civil Rights Division responded that it had reviewed the submission and decided not to take further action, noting that it receives several thousand reports each year and cannot act on every one. It did not determine that the complaint lacked merit.
The result is a system in which a judge can deny ADA accommodations to a self-represented litigant, dismiss over 100 motions without explanation, cancel hearings without notice, refuse to enforce a standing court order — and face no external accountability mechanism capable of reviewing whether any of it was lawful.
Part Two: The Network
The accountability gap does not exist in isolation. It exists alongside a professional network that connects sitting judges, retired judges, practicing attorneys, and the private dispute resolution industry in ways that are simultaneously public, documented, and rarely examined.
The Bar Association of Montgomery County Maryland — barmont.org, headquartered at 27 West Jefferson Street in Rockville — is the professional organization for attorneys practicing in Montgomery County. It is also something more specific: it is the organization through which the Montgomery County judiciary is formally embedded in the local legal community.
The Bar Association’s own Bench-Bar section connects sitting judges directly with practicing attorneys. The Bar Association’s Judicial Nominating process gives it a formal role in vetting judicial candidates — every applicant’s qualifications are subjected to a vote by Bar Association members before being submitted to the Judicial Nominating Commission. The judges who receive those recommendations then sit on cases brought by the attorneys who voted.
This is not unique to Montgomery County. It is how bar associations function across the country. What makes it worth examining here is what happens when a self-represented litigant files judicial complaints within this system.
When a litigant files a complaint against a judge with the Commission on Judicial Disabilities, that complaint is sealed. But the filing is not invisible. The litigant’s name is known. The case is known. The judge against whom the complaint is filed is known. In a professional network that operates through regular Bar Association events, speaking programs, committee meetings, and shared professional organizations, information travels. There is no mechanism to prevent it from doing so. There is no mechanism to detect whether it does.
The case of Michael Phillips — the father whose case forms the documented record for this investigation — involved 119 documented motions across 21 named judges, judicial complaints filed and sealed, and what Phillips describes as a pattern of increasingly aggressive dismissals following those filings. Whether those dismissals were retaliatory is unprovable without access to sealed records that no external body has the authority to review. What is provable is that the structural conditions for retaliation to occur without detection exist in their entirety.
That is the accountability question this investigation asks — not whether retaliation occurred, but whether the system is capable of detecting it if it did.
It is not.
Part Three: The Revolving Door
There is a third element to this network that is publicly documented and largely unreported.
When judges leave the Montgomery County Circuit Court, they do not leave the legal ecosystem. They enter a lucrative private market for alternative dispute resolution services — mediation, arbitration, and judge pro tempore work — where their judicial relationships, their knowledge of local practitioners, and their credibility as former judges command hourly rates that can exceed their judicial salaries.
Judge Harry C. Storm, one of the 21 judges named in the documented denial of Michael Phillips’s motions, was a member of the Montgomery County Bar Association during his tenure on the bench, sat on the Panel of Neutrals for the American Arbitration Association while still a sitting judge, and served on both the Trial Courts Judicial Nominating Commission — which vets judicial candidates — and the Attorney Grievance Review Board. After retiring from the bench, he moved into private ADR work, a transition documented in Father & Co.’s prior reporting.
This is not unusual. It is the industry standard.
The McCammon Group, one of the dominant private ADR firms in the mid-Atlantic region, describes itself as consisting of retired judges and practicing attorneys throughout Virginia, Washington D.C., and Maryland. Its roster includes former chief judges and associate judges from circuit courts across the region. The firm’s own marketing emphasizes that its neutrals “understand our courts” — an explicit selling point derived from having sat on them.
Juridical Solutions PLC operates similarly, describing its panel as consisting exclusively of retired circuit judges charging between $350 and $475 per hour. Its selling point is the same: the value proposition is judicial experience, judicial relationships, and judicial credibility — assets accumulated at public expense, monetized privately.
The Montgomery County Circuit Court itself maintains a court-approved roster of ADR mediators that includes senior judges who can earn private fees mediating cases of the same type they previously adjudicated. The court’s own ADR documentation confirms that senior judges are among the approved neutrals on this roster.
The Bar Association of Montgomery County Maryland operates its own Center for Mediation and Arbitration — a for-profit ADR service whose marketing describes “an All-Star Panel of Neutrals” including “former Common Pleas Judges.” The same bar association that connects sitting judges with practicing attorneys also operates a dispute resolution service staffed by judges who recently left those benches.
None of this is illegal. All of it is documented. And taken together, it describes an ecosystem in which the financial incentives for retired judges flow from the same professional relationships they cultivated while on the bench — creating structural conditions in which the quality of one’s performance as a sitting judge, as evaluated by the attorneys who will later hire that judge as a mediator, is a factor in post-retirement income.
That is not an accusation of corruption. It is a description of incentive structure. And incentive structures matter when examining why courts might systematically favor outcomes that attorneys — the future clients of retiring judges — prefer.
Part Four: The Record
The documented record in Michael Phillips’s case — case number 168564-FL, Circuit Court for Montgomery County — provides a concrete example of what the accountability gap looks like from the inside.
Phillips has not had court-ordered parenting time with his son since January 21, 2024, consistently denied by the child’s mother, Christina Avgerinos. The court order requiring that access has been in place since March 2021. It has never been modified by any judicial ruling. It is simply not being enforced.
In March 2024, Phillips filed for contempt. This was not the first time. Over the following months, he filed motions totaling 119 documented entries across both of his cases — contempt petitions, enforcement requests, emergency motions, motions for ADA accommodations related to his ADHD, PTSD, and neurological diagnoses, requests to correct what he describes as fraudulent mischaracterizations of those diagnoses in opposing filings, requests for clarification of denials, requests for discovery enforcement, and motions to vacate a prior protective order he characterizes as based on false allegations. The motions were heard by 21 different judges. Of 119 documented entries, 116 were denied, dismissed, deferred without resolution, or received no ruling at all.
The single substantive motion granted — a motion for a custody evaluation, ordered July 3, 2024 — was never implemented. The evaluation did not occur. Phillips’s subsequent motions to enforce the court’s own order were ignored.
Virtually the entire proceeding was conducted on paper. There were no substantive hearings and no trial. Denial orders were issued without written opinions and without stated legal basis. Motions for clarification of those denials were themselves denied. Requests for full disclosure of the court’s reasoning were denied. The court’s own records confirm that one motion was denied as moot on the grounds that “matters resolve on papers” — for a hearing the court itself had canceled without notice or explanation.
The ADA Record
Beginning April 11, 2023, Phillips filed formal ADA accommodation requests — using the court’s own designated form — at regular intervals. Prior to this, starting in July 2022, he made regular email requests to the county’s ADA coordinator that were most often ignored. He requested breaks during proceedings, remote participation, written instructions, extended deadlines, access to recordings and transcripts, and the assistance of a legal advocate or disability representative. His disabilities — ADHD, PTSD, and the residual effects of childhood epilepsy — are documented in medical records spanning to the 1980’s, and in an updated formal diagnosis obtained in October 2023.
Between April 11, 2023, and August 19, 2024 — a period of sixteen months — Phillips filed ten formal accommodation requests. He received no response of any kind.
On August 21, 2024, a clerk rejected his most recent filing. The rejection stated that the court’s accommodation form applies only to physical and sensory disabilities: American Sign Language interpretation, assistive listening devices, CART captioning, certified deaf interpreters, and note-takers. Cognitive and neurological disabilities — the categories covering ADHD, PTSD, and epilepsy — are not listed. The form the court told Phillips to use from the beginning of his case does not cover the disabilities he has.
Phillips filed a follow-up response identifying accommodations that fell within the categories the clerk had described. He received no response to that filing either.
The hearing for which the accommodations were requested — scheduled for September 13, 2024 — was canceled without notice. Phillips discovered the cancellation only by checking the court’s scheduling portal. No reason was given. No notice mailed. No rescheduling was offered. The court resolved the pending accommodation request by eliminating the proceeding it was filed for.
The August 21, 2024, clerk’s rejection was the only official communication Phillips received about his ADA requests across sixteen months and ten filings. It informed him, in procedural terms, that the court’s own accommodation system does not apply to his disabilities.
The Complaint Record
Phillips filed complaints with the Commission on Judicial Disabilities. The records are sealed. He filed a civil rights complaint with the MCCR — formally charged October 2, 2024, dual-filed with the EEOC — and was told by phone that the commission lacked jurisdiction over the courts and could not proceed. He filed a DOJ Civil Rights complaint on October 16, 2024, and received a non-action response. He contacted the Maryland Judiciary’s Access to Justice office and was told it could not review judicial decisions. He contacted Disability Rights Maryland, which opened an intake and then declined, citing its policy of avoiding family law cases. He reached out to Legal Aid, MVLS, multiple domestic violence organizations, and five state delegates. He sent a formal letter to State Court Administrator Judy K. Rupp on October 31, 2024, documenting the full pattern and asking whether any path forward existed.
By October 2024, Phillips filed a motion to withdraw his petitions. The court granted it on October 15, 2024. Not because he had run out of legal arguments — but because, as he has stated publicly and in communications to every agency listed above, continuing was destroying his health, his finances, and what remained of his relationship with his son. Every denial further empowered the child’s mother, Christina Avgerinos, to continue disobeying the court order.
The record he compiled — preserved in the Maryland judiciary’s own case portal — shows a self-represented litigant using every tool the system provides, across every available legal avenue, for over three years. And the system closed every door. This included any hope for a co-parenting relationship with the child’s mother.
Part Five: What the Structure Protects
Maryland’s Commission on Judicial Disabilities was established to investigate complaints against judges. It operates in secret. A litigant who files a complaint cannot obtain a copy of their own complaint after submission. There is no public reporting requirement for the number of complaints received, the number investigated, the number dismissed, or the reasons for dismissal. The institution that oversees judicial conduct in Maryland is accountable to no public record.
This is not an oversight. The Maryland Rules governing the Commission on Judicial Disabilities explicitly provide for confidentiality. The rationale given is judicial independence — that judges must be insulated from frivolous or politically motivated complaints. The rationale is not unreasonable in isolation. It becomes unreasonable when combined with the absence of any alternative external mechanism.
What the structure protects, in practical terms, is the judiciary’s ability to respond to complaints without any external party being able to verify the response. A complaint filed, sealed, and dismissed produces no public record. The litigant knows they filed. The Commission knows it received. No one else knows anything. And when that litigant subsequently has every motion denied by judges in the same courthouse, no accountability mechanism exists to determine whether the sealed complaint and the subsequent denials are related.
The same logic applies to the ADA accommodation process. When a court’s own accommodation form excludes the categories of disability a litigant has, and when the court’s response to a compliant refiling is silence, and when the proceeding itself is then canceled without notice — there is no external body that can ask why. The MCCR lacks jurisdiction. The Commission on Judicial Disabilities seals its records. The Access to Justice office cannot review decisions. DRM avoids family law. The DOJ declined to act.
The DOJ Civil Rights Division — the one external mechanism with actual Title II jurisdiction — is a federal body handling complaints from across the country. Its capacity to investigate individual state court cases involving self-represented litigants in family proceedings is limited. Its process requires navigating federal civil rights procedures that are significantly more complex than state court filings. For a self-represented litigant already exhausted by a state court system that canceled hearings without notice and denied 119 motions without explanation, the DOJ complaint process is not a realistic remedy. It is a theoretical one.
Part Six: The Questions That Remain
This investigation does not claim that Montgomery County’s family court judges acted improperly in any specific ruling. Judicial decisions are presumed lawful absent evidence to the contrary, and the docket record alone does not establish impropriety.
What this investigation documents is structural:
There is no external civil rights body with jurisdiction to receive complaints against Maryland courts. The MCCR has confirmed this in writing and by phone.
The Commission on Judicial Disabilities seals all complaint records and does not publicly report on complaints received or dismissed. There is no way for a litigant, a journalist, or a legislator to verify how complaints are processed.
The Maryland Judiciary’s own internal mechanisms — the ADA Coordinator, the Access to Justice office, the State Court Administrator — each lack the authority or mandate to provide external review of the conduct being complained about. They route back to the institution.
The court’s own ADA accommodation form does not cover cognitive or neurological disabilities. A litigant with ADHD, PTSD, or epilepsy cannot use the designated form to request accommodations for those conditions. The sixteen-month non-response to ten accommodation requests — followed by a rejection stating the form doesn’t apply — followed by silence after a compliant refiling — is documented in the court’s own filing system.
The Bar Association of Montgomery County Maryland formally connects sitting judges with practicing attorneys through its nominating process, its Bench-Bar committee, and its professional programming. The same organization operates a for-profit ADR service staffed by recently retired judges from the same bench.
Retired Montgomery County Circuit Court judges move into private ADR work where their client base consists of the same attorneys who appeared before them on the bench. Senior judges remain on the court’s approved ADR mediator roster after retiring, earning private fees mediating cases similar to those they previously adjudicated as public officials.
When a self-represented litigant files complaints against judges within this system, the complaints are sealed, the filings are known within the professional network, and no mechanism exists to detect whether subsequent rulings are affected by those filings.
These are not allegations. They are documented structural conditions. They are verifiable through public records, court documents, bar association websites, ADR firm rosters, and the Maryland judiciary’s own case portal.
The question they raise — who is watching when no one is watching — does not have a comfortable answer.
Disclosure
Michael Phillips is the founder of Riptide, MDBayNews, and Father & Co. He is a member of Investigative Reporters and Editors and the National Writers Union. He is the subject of the case record described in this investigation. This disclosure is made at the outset because the documentation on which this investigation rests is his own — and because the accountability gap it describes exists independent of the outcome in any individual case, including the one that brought it to our attention.
The documented case record referenced in this investigation — 168564-FL — is publicly available through the Maryland Judiciary Case Search portal. The Father & Co. series Still Here has published installments documenting the personal record of this case as it developed in real time. That series and this investigation are related but serve different editorial purposes. Still Here is a firsthand account. This is a structural analysis.
All legal references in this article are informational only and do not constitute legal advice. Riptide is not a law firm. Father & Co. is not a law firm. If you are navigating a civil rights matter involving a state court proceeding, the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division accepts complaints at justice.gov/crt. If you are navigating a family court matter, consult a licensed attorney in your state.
Keep Father & Co. Free
Father & Co. exists to support parents navigating separation, custody, and systems that are often confusing, isolating, or overwhelming. This work is grounded in lived experience, careful research, and respect for the real stakes families face.
If this article helped you feel less alone, better informed, or more grounded, reader support helps keep these resources free and available to others who need them.
Need help reviewing or organizing court or formal documents?
Father & Co. offers non-legal document review and organization for people representing themselves. This includes clarity, structure, neutral tone, and timeline organization — not legal advice or representation.
Have a story, experience, or resource to share?
Submissions are reviewed with care and discretion. We respect privacy and handle sensitive information responsibly.
Discover more from Fatherand.Co
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
