A New York ruling has exposed a national infrastructure failure. For targeted parents, the consequences are not abstract.
By Michael Phillips | Father & Co.
On May 26, 2026, New York’s Court of Appeals confronted something that should have been impossible: a criminal trial that had produced no coherent transcript at all. The stenographer assigned to People v. Meyers had filled the official record with the words “blah blah blah,” “omitted,” and “untranscribable” in place of actual testimony. Three full days of jury selection were missing. So were opening statements, summations, jury instructions, jury notes, and the verdict itself.
The court called the failures “utterly inexcusable.” It held that a reconstruction hearing — a process by which participants try to reconstruct from memory what was said — was sufficient in that particular case and affirmed the conviction.
But Meyers was a criminal case. The defendant had constitutional protections, an appointed attorney, and the full machinery of the state standing behind the record. The question the ruling left unanswered is the one that matters most for the readers of this publication: what happens when the transcript is gone, and there is no constitutional safety net, no appointed counsel, and no one standing behind the record except a parent who has already lost?
Marc Fishman knows what happens. He has been waiting years to find out.
The Record That Wasn’t There
Fishman is a New Rochelle father whose family court case has become one of the more documented illustrations of how transcript access functions as a gate on appellate review. He sought transcripts from New Rochelle City Court appearances on December 17, 2018, and January 8, 2019 — nearly seven years ago. The transcripts were never produced. In a statement quoted recently in the Yonkers Times, Fishman wrote that the inability to obtain them “for years has inhibited and delayed my appeal.”
He added something that reconstruction hearing proponents rarely account for: that the people who would need to participate in any reconstruction effort — judges, attorneys, prosecutors, police officers — are no longer in their original roles. The human memory that a reconstruction depends on has scattered. The institutional knowledge is gone. What remains is a gap in the record where his appellate rights used to be.
This is not an unusual story. It is, increasingly, the default condition of family court litigation in America.
The Scale of the Problem
The court reporter shortage has been documented extensively at the national level, but the family court dimension tends to get buried in broader access-to-justice discussions. The numbers, when isolated for family proceedings, are striking.
In California — the state where the crisis has been most thoroughly litigated and publicized — the Judicial Branch has tracked every hearing conducted without a verbatim record since April 2023. Out of 2,831,721 family law, probate, and unlimited civil hearings held between April 1, 2023, and June 30, 2025, approximately 2,037,562 — 72 percent — had no verbatim record. California’s own Supreme Court has stated that the absence of such a record will “frequently be fatal” to a litigant’s ability to have an appeal decided on the merits.
The National Center for State Courts, in its August 2025 workforce findings, reported that more than 70 percent of court systems surveyed had experienced staffing shortages in the previous year, and 61 percent expected shortages to continue. Twenty percent reported delays in more than 30 percent of cases. Only 23,000 stenographers remain in the national workforce, with further declines projected.
The profession is aging out rather than filling in. The National Court Reporters Association reports an average member age of approximately 56. Training programs have collapsed — California alone went from 17 certified programs in 2010 to eight as of 2025. The pipeline that should be replacing retiring reporters is producing a fraction of what’s needed.
The result is a profession that is structurally unable to meet demand, in a court system that still requires verbatim records for the most consequential hearings it conducts.
Why Family Court Is Uniquely Exposed
Every level of the court system faces some version of this problem. But family court sits in an especially precarious position for reasons that compound one another.
The first is priority. When court systems triage reporter assignments, criminal proceedings take precedence. Felony trials, constitutional minimums, speedy trial requirements — these create legal obligations that push family hearings toward the bottom of the queue. In California, the data bears this out directly: family law and probate proceedings account for the majority of hearings conducted without a verbatim record, not because they are less important, but because the shortage forces exactly this kind of informal triage.
The second is cost. A private court reporter in California costs approximately $3,300 per day — a figure that effectively converts a constitutional protection into a luxury item. Litigants who can afford to hire their own reporter get a record. Litigants who cannot are left with whatever the court chooses to produce, which may be nothing. This creates a two-tier system of appellate access organized around wealth.
The third is irreversibility. The Family Violence Appellate Project, a legal organization that provides free representation to domestic violence survivors in California and Washington state, has documented dozens of cases it was forced to turn away because no verbatim record existed. In one, a survivor had been physically abused by her husband — pulled from a car and shoved into a concrete wall — but the trial court denied her restraining order request despite photographic evidence of her injuries. No court reporter was present. No record was made. No attorney would take the appeal.
In another case, the organization could not help a survivor challenge a court order that removed a sobriety testing requirement for her children’s father — a father who had been skipping tests rather than passing them — because no verbatim record of that hearing existed either.
These are not cases where the outcome was ambiguous. They are cases where the mechanism that would allow review simply wasn’t there.
The Targeted Parent Problem
For the families this publication covers — parents separated from their children through processes that frequently involve judicial error, professional misconduct, or institutional bias — the transcript gap is not a background concern. It is often the mechanism by which bad rulings become permanent.
The appellate process in family court depends entirely on the record below. An appellate court cannot find that a trial judge improperly credited a guardian ad litem’s recommendation if there is no transcript of the hearing where that recommendation was made. It cannot find that testimony was improperly admitted, that findings of fact were unsupported, or that constitutional due process was violated if the words that were spoken were never preserved.
This is not a procedural technicality. It is the difference between a ruling that is reviewable and a ruling that is final, regardless of its merits.
Courts hold what legal doctrine describes as “non-delegable duties” in child custody proceedings — meaning they cannot outsource the determination of a child’s welfare to a parenting coordinator, a guardian ad litem, or any other third party. But the enforcement mechanism for that principle is the appeal. And the appeal requires the transcript. When the transcript doesn’t exist, the duty that cannot be delegated goes unreviewed.
For a parent who has lost custody on the basis of a hearing that produced no record, reconstruction is the only option. And as Fishman’s case illustrates, reconstruction has a half-life. The longer the gap between the hearing and the attempt to reconstruct it, the less usable the result.
Maryland and the Digital Recording Gap
Maryland’s courts largely avoided the California-scale stenographer crisis by an early transition to digital audio recording — Montgomery County completed this shift in 1982, and the state’s circuit courts have operated on electronic systems ever since. This is, on its face, better than California’s situation. Proceedings are at least captured.
But the production of a certified transcript from an audio recording still requires a qualified transcriptionist. And Maryland ranks last among all fifty states in court reporter compensation — dead last, at an average salary of approximately $78,000 annually, according to current market data. A state that pays the least for this work is not well-positioned to attract the workers needed to convert audio recordings into usable appellate records on reasonable timelines.
Maryland does offer a Transcript Assistance Fund for appellants in custody and visitation cases who meet income guidelines. But the fund is narrow, income-gated, and addresses cost rather than the logistical barriers that stall transcript production in the first place. A parent who earns slightly above the cutoff, or whose case involves proceedings where the audio quality is poor, or whose case is years old, is not helped by the fund at all.
Maryland Rule 8-411(a) requires appellants to order transcripts within ten days of filing a notice of appeal. Failure to comply may result in dismissal of the appeal. That deadline does not pause for transcript delays, staffing shortages, or audio files that turn out to be unusable.
What Meyers Actually Decided
It is worth being precise about what People v. Meyers did and did not establish.
The Court of Appeals held that reconstruction was adequate in that case. It did not hold that reconstruction is always adequate, or that a court’s failure to maintain a verbatim record is constitutionally harmless. The ruling was narrow in ways that matter for family court litigants.
Criminal defendants have constitutional protections for the record that civil litigants — including parents in custody proceedings — do not. The Sixth Amendment, the right to effective assistance of counsel, the right to appeal a criminal conviction: these create a floor below which the state cannot go. Family court has no comparable floor. The due process protections that apply are real but thinner, and they are enforced through the very appellate mechanism that the transcript gap disables.
The Meyers ruling is useful as a news peg because it put the problem on the record in a way that is hard to ignore. A New York court acknowledged, at the highest level, that a court reporter had produced a transcript so defective it was essentially fictional. That acknowledgment is significant. But for targeted parents, the more important question is not whether reconstruction cures the problem in criminal cases. It is whether the system that is supposed to produce the record is functioning at all in the cases where their children’s futures are being decided.
A Structural Argument
What the court reporter crisis makes visible is something that critics of family court have argued for years through other frameworks: that the system contains no reliable mechanism for self-correction.
Judicial misconduct commissions rarely act on family court complaints. Sanctions against attorneys who use abusive litigation tactics are uncommon. Custody evaluators and guardians ad litem operate with minimal oversight. And now we can add: the record of what actually happened in many family court proceedings is frequently never made, or made so poorly that it cannot support an appeal.
The result is a court that is largely unobservable and largely unreviewable. What the judge said, what the evaluator testified, what the attorney argued, what the standard of proof actually was in practice — these things exist in a transcript, or they do not exist at all. When they do not exist, the court is effectively operating without accountability.
This is not a feature that benefits children. It is a feature that benefits whoever holds the gavel.
People v. Meyers gave that problem a name. The shortage that produced Meyers’ missing transcript is the same shortage that has made millions of family court hearings unappealable. The difference is that Meyers’ case ended up in front of New York’s highest court. Most family court litigants never get that far — because without the transcript, there is nowhere to go.
Father & Co. covers systemic failures in the family court system from a gender-neutral perspective. If you are a parent who has experienced transcript access barriers in your case, we want to hear from you.
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