Before, during, and after our lawsuit, I carried a long list of assumptions about how the judicial system worked—assumptions I didn’t even realize were assumptions until they started collapsing one by one.
I believed the system was fundamentally fair.
I believed the judge was a neutral umpire.
I believed truth mattered—because how could it not?
I believed rules existed to prevent the powerful from steamrolling the ordinary.
I believed appeals were where obvious errors got corrected.
I believed oversight bodies existed to enforce ethics, not to manage optics.
And then I lived through a case where, in practice, those ideals didn’t protect us the way I thought they would. Not reliably. Not consistently. Not when it mattered most.
What follows isn’t a claim that nothing in the system ever works. It’s something more unsettling: the realization that many of the things citizens are taught to believe about courts are, at best, conditional. They may be true sometimes. They may even be true often. But when they aren’t true—when the safeguards fail—there may be no meaningful remedy.
Misconception #1: “The judicial system is fair.”
Fairness, I learned, is not a baseline feature. It’s an outcome—one that depends on decision-makers, incentives, local culture, procedure, and how aggressively rules are enforced.
In our case, what I watched didn’t feel like “we lost because the law required it.” It felt like the process itself was elastic—capable of stretching to accommodate one side’s narrative while tightening around the other’s. That sense—that the system could become the weapon—eventually became part of why we built Justice-Denied in the first place.
Misconception #2: “The judge is fair and impartial.”
I used to think impartiality meant the judge would stay in his lane: decide issues based on the record, apply the same standards to both sides, and avoid becoming part of the story.
But impartiality isn’t only about whether a judge intends to be fair. It’s also about whether the judge’s actions create a reasonable basis for doubt—especially when the judge appears to rely on extra-record facts, selectively engages evidence, or treats similar conduct differently depending on who did it.
And once you start noticing pattern after pattern—selective enforcement, selective scrutiny, selective “concern”—it changes you. It changes how you read orders. It changes how you hear courtroom questions. It changes how you interpret silence.
Misconception #3: “Both sides have to tell the truth.”
Technically, yes. Functionally, not always.
One of the hardest lessons is that truth can exist in the record and still be treated as optional by the tribunal. Worse: if the fact pattern is messy, the truth can be “handled” through framing—by minimizing one set of facts, inflating another, or narrowing the legal lens until uncomfortable realities are conveniently outside the frame.
That is a special kind of disillusionment: learning that the outcome doesn’t always track the truth, even when the truth is documented.
Misconception #4: “If a party or attorney fails to tell the truth, the judge will take care of the problem.”
I assumed there were teeth behind the expectations: if someone lies, there’s a consequence; if someone games discovery, the court intervenes.
But what I saw—again, in practice—was that consequences are discretionary. And discretion is not evenly distributed.
When the response to falsehoods is indifference, the court unintentionally teaches a brutal lesson: dishonesty is a strategy that can pay.
Misconception #5: “Deleting evidence will cost you your case.”
If you haven’t lived this, it sounds obvious. People assume courts treat evidence deletion like a five-alarm fire—because it strikes at the heart of truth-seeking.
Yet even where forensic analysis points to significant deletion activity, the judicial system can still treat it like a manageable nuisance rather than a case-altering event—especially if the court accepts a minimized version of what happened or declines to grapple with the full scope.
That realization is infuriating—not just because it’s unfair, but because it rewards the very conduct the rules are supposed to deter.
Misconception #6: “Protective orders are strictly enforced.”
A protective order, to a normal person, means: This information is sensitive; the court will protect it; violations will be taken seriously.
But our experience taught me that protective orders can be enforced selectively—treated as urgent when it protects one set of interests and “moot” when it protects another.
When you’re watching private medical and mental-health information get exposed—and nothing happens—you learn that the word “protective” may describe the paper, not the practice.
Misconception #7: “The judicial system will protect victims of abuse from further harm.”
This is one of the most painful misconceptions to lose—because it isn’t just about procedure. It’s about safety, dignity, and basic human decency.
I believed courts understood something fundamental: that abuse doesn’t always end when the abusive relationship ends. Survivors carry the aftereffects—fear, hypervigilance, triggers, and a lifetime of learned survival instincts. And when a courtroom forces a survivor to relive, justify, or “prove” their trauma in a hostile setting, the system can become a second layer of harm.
In our experience, the process did not feel trauma-informed. It did not feel protective. At times it felt like the system treated deeply personal, abuse-related history as a tool to be minimized, reframed, or used against the very person it was supposed to safeguard.
And when confidential medical or mental-health information is released in violation of a protective order—then met with silence—the message to victims is chilling: even the rules designed to protect you can be optional.
This misconception matters because it’s not abstract. If courts don’t reliably protect abuse survivors from further harm, then the “justice system” becomes one more institution victims learn they can’t trust—another place where power and posture can override empathy and reality.
Misconception #8: “Discovery rules are liberal and applied fairly.”
People who have never litigated imagine discovery as a balanced exchange: both sides produce relevant evidence; disputes get resolved; gamesmanship gets punished.
In reality, discovery can become trench warfare. And if the court doesn’t enforce the rules consistently, the party willing to play harder—delay longer, disclose less, delete more, deny more—can gain strategic advantage simply by exhausting the other side.
That’s not an accident of the system. It’s an incentive structure.
Misconception #9: “A judge is like an umpire—calling balls and strikes.”
This one might be the most psychologically jarring, because it’s the civic metaphor we’re all raised on.
But in our experience, the judge didn’t always feel like an impartial umpire. At times it felt like the court could become a participant: shaping the narrative, smoothing contradictions, narrowing the issues, and—when it comes to the appearance of conflicts—resolving factual disputes in a way that didn’t come from the record as the parties presented it.
When that happens, “balls and strikes” turns into something else entirely: the strike zone moves, and the batter is blamed for not adjusting quickly enough.
Misconception #10: “The judicial system is open and transparent.”
Courts are public in theory—public filings, public hearings, written orders.
But transparency isn’t only about whether the doors are unlocked. It’s about whether the decision-making is intelligible and accountable:
Are the true reasons stated plainly?
Are key facts addressed rather than omitted?
Are standards applied consistently?
Are conflicts disclosed in a way the public can evaluate?
If a system can remain technically “open” while functionally obscuring its real drivers, transparency becomes performative.
Misconception #11: “The Court of Appeals is an error-correcting court.”
I believed appeals were where the system fixed itself.
Then I encountered the concept of a “rubber-stamp affirmance”—the idea that an appellate opinion can echo the lower court’s reasoning without the kind of searching analysis ordinary citizens assume is guaranteed.
Even reading those words still feels surreal, because it violates the foundational comfort people take in the idea of checks and balances: If a trial judge gets it wrong, the appellate court will catch it.
Misconception #12: “Bright-line rules exist to ensure fairness.”
This one deserves special attention, because it goes to the heart of due process.
A bright-line rule is supposed to mean: no exceptions, no improvisation, and no “context” that swallows the rule. And Minnesota courts have described certain judicial limits that way—especially around judges conducting independent factual investigations outside the record.
But here’s what I learned: to the public, a bright-line rule can become very dim indeed—if the system treats it as waivable, procedural, or forfeitable depending on posture, framing, or timing.
That’s the moment idealism dies: when “guardrails” start looking like suggestions.
Misconception #13: “The Minnesota Supreme Court reviews cases that were not decided correctly.”
Most people assume a state supreme court functions like a backstop—an institution that swoops in when something has plainly gone off the rails.
But discretionary review doesn’t work that way. Supreme courts select a small number of cases for reasons that often have little to do with whether a particular litigant was treated fairly. That’s not an insult; it’s the structure. But it collides hard with what ordinary citizens think is happening.
So, when you discover you may never get meaningful review—no matter how deeply you believe the process failed—you realize the “last resort” you pictured is not a guarantee. It’s a lottery ticket.
Misconception #14: “Oversight exists to enforce judicial ethics.”
I believed the Minnesota Board on Judicial Standards existed to enforce the Code of Judicial Conduct—not to manage reputational risk, not to deflect, not to reframe documented conduct as mere “disagreement with rulings.”
Then I read official dismissal letters and compared them with the Board’s public messaging about accountability, impartiality, and public trust.
That contrast—between message and reality—has been its own form of disillusionment, because it suggests the watchdog may be culturally aligned with what it is supposed to watch.
Misconception #15: “Checks and balances ensure justice.”
This was the biggest lie I told myself—because it wasn’t one belief, it was the belief behind all the others.
I assumed the system had internal correction mechanisms:
trial judges constrained by law,
appellate courts correcting errors,
oversight bodies enforcing ethics,
rules and sanctions deterring misconduct,
transparency allowing public accountability.
What I learned is that checks and balances only work if the institutions actually use them—especially when it’s uncomfortable, politically costly, or socially inconvenient.
And in a place where relationships, familiarity, and professional networks can quietly shape outcomes, the “neutral system” citizens imagine can start to look like something else—something local, insular, and self-protective.
That’s why the word “hometowned” landed the way it did: informal at first, then hauntingly explanatory.
What disillusionment does to you
Disillusionment isn’t just anger. It’s grief.
It’s grieving the civic story you grew up with.
It’s grieving the idea that truth is self-executing.
It’s grieving the assumption that courts are designed to protect the vulnerable from the powerful—especially when the vulnerable include people carrying trauma, abuse histories, and legitimate fear.
And it’s disorienting, because once you see the gap between ideals and practice, you can’t unsee it.
You start to understand why so many people walk away from court feeling not just “I lost,” but “I was never really heard.”
What I believe now
I still believe in law as an ideal. I still believe courts can function with fairness and integrity. But I no longer believe those outcomes are automatic—or that citizens should assume they will be protected by institutional goodwill.
Here’s what I believe now:
Fairness must be demanded, documented, and defended.
Truth must be proven—and then proven again, in ways the system cannot ignore.
Process often matters as much as merits.
Oversight must be real—not promotional.
Bright-line rules are only bright if courts enforce them without inventing escape hatches.
And I believe sunlight matters—because when institutions won’t correct themselves, public visibility may be the only remaining force capable of pressure.
That is the point of Justice-Denied: not vengeance, not spectacle—visibility and accountability grounded in records, timelines, and evidence.
🔗 For more on judicial ethics and court reform in Minnesota, visit https://justice-denied.org.
