With their matching light wood paneling and benches, the courtrooms on the second floor of the Washtenaw County Courthouse are almost identical. But Tim Connors’ court stands out. On the walls are Native American dream catchers, large photos of a smiling young girl holding a bunch of daisies and the late U-M football player and Ann Arbor police officer Vada Murray, and a woven seal of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, showing a red-tailed hawk bringing wood to a campfire.

Connors’ judicial attorney and referee, Jennifer Sullivan, says that lawyers in other cases sometimes ask her if they can just come in and sit down “because the space feels more safe. They feel the space is a place of healing rather than a place of hurtfulness.”

Even in his robes, up on the bench, Connors looks relaxed–running his hand through his hair, leaning back, listening. And instead of lawyers making arguments or witnesses giving testimony, he’s watching more than a dozen people seated close together, talking through a complicated family matter.

This is the Washtenaw County Peacemaking Court. Connors has been a circuit court judge since 1997, but he introduced peacemaking–the Pokagon Band calls it “native justice”–only after he took over the court’s juvenile docket in the fall of 2014.

Instead of adversarial proceedings, lawyers, social workers, and family members work together to resolve conflicts. “If we’re talking about putting [relationships] back together, then our way of communicating, and the way we address issues, needs to be respectful,” says Connors. “We need to hear the other side–as opposed to, ‘I’m trying to get my legal right to trump and extinguish the other’s legal rights.’

“If you’re going to take away six buzz words,” says Connors, “here they are: safe children, strong families, supportive communities.”

Ironically, however, the creation of Peacemaking Court was far from peaceful. And people who care deeply about the children who come before Connors feel they were not heard.

In June 2014, Joyce Tesoriero sent an email to Sullivan on behalf of Michigan CASA. CASA stands for Court Appointed Special Advocates, a group of volunteers who work with children in the custody of the courts. Tesoriero, a coordinator of the county CASA program, wanted to invite Judge Connors to be the keynote speaker at the state group’s annual conference in October.

Connors sent his acceptance–only to withdraw it a few weeks before the event. That was her first warning of what was to come.

The CASA program originated in Seattle in the 1990s. “A judge realized there was a need for … someone who really paid attention to what was going on with an individual child” in foster care, Tesoriero told me for an article I wrote two years ago (“Caring CASAs,” December 2013). “Workers are overloaded, lawyers are overloaded. So he came up with this idea of citizen volunteers who just had one case, or one sibling group, who really got to know the child and know the needs of the child.”

Tesoriero called the program “volunteering on steroids.” After a forty-hour pre-service training program, CASAs are sworn in as officers of the court. They then have access to the child’s records, can interview people involved with the case, and present written recommendations to the court.

But Connors saw no need for those recommendations–or for the CASAs.

In October 2014, Deborah Shaw, then the court’s juvenile program manager, emailed the CASA volunteers and coordinators. “I am writing today to notify you that the Court has decided to explore new approaches to providing services to children and families on our neglect/abuse docket,” Shaw wrote. “As such, we will begin to phase out our CASA program.”

The child advocates had devoted years to helping children who were victims of abuse or neglect. They visited them, got them tutoring, took them to basketball games, and reunited separated siblings. Without them, they wondered, who would make sure the kids were well cared for? Who would advocate for them and keep the court informed about how they were doing?

Tesoriero fought back. She sent a long letter to the volunteers, the state and national CASA organizations, and others involved in the program. “I reached out to Judge Connors on several occasions so that we could discuss the ways that CASA could work along with his initiatives to help the foster children in Washtenaw County,” she wrote. “None of these invitations were ever accepted.

“Instead, one of Judge Connors’ first acts in his new role was to eliminate CASA. Only after announcing the closing of the program and facing media attention for this decision did Judge Connors agree to meet with volunteers.”

It did not go well. “At the start of the meeting several volunteers asked if the Judge would explain his vision and his reasons for closing the program so that an honest dialogue about CASA and the proposed alternatives could begin,” Tesoriero wrote. But Connors “insisted that he would not speak until the volunteers had spoken their ‘truths’ and laid out their ’emotions.’

“After the presentation, Judge Connors admonished the group for their ‘I’ statements … The judge stated that the new group of volunteers to supplant CASA would be recruited to focus on assisting in parent-child visitation and helping parents learn how to better parent their children.”

Then Connors had the volunteers watch a movie on Native American families and culture. “There was a complete disconnect between the point of this video and the CASA meeting agenda,” Tesoriero wrote. In her view, the judge’s “refusal to engage in a meaningful dialogue, and his rude dismissal of volunteers who have collectively donated thousands of hours to help neglected and abused children find safe, permanent homes, evidenced a powerful ego and profound insensitivity.”

Retired entrepreneur Dean DeGalan’s review is even harsher–he described it to me as a “cockamamie peacemaking session … [Connors] said that the program or our presence was all about us, and that basically we couldn’t hold a candle to the dedication and professionalism of the people he worked with. He was absolutely rude, condescending, and arrogant.”

DeGalan had worked with two siblings–a girl who flourished with foster parents he described as “mentors with a capital M” and a boy whose behavior got steadily worse as he bounced from placement to placement and ended up in a Saginaw lockup.

“I served as the person who corralled all of the parties who were supposedly involved and pulled into the case for his benefit to address certain matters that were helter-skelter at times,” DeGalan says. “Can that role be replaced by a peacemaking circle?”

The short answer, supporters of peacemaking say, is yes.

I’ve come in at the tail end of a complicated case in Connors’ courtroom involving multiple fathers (one in court, one on speakerphone), children (not in court), a mother, caseworkers, lawyers, and other relatives.

This is not a circle–those meetings take place in private, at the office of the Dispute Resolution Center, the nonprofit Connors brought in to replace CASA. But everyone gathered before the judge is part of the circle. When everyone has had a chance to speak, Connors asks if anyone has anything else to say. The father, who’d previously said nothing, now raises his hand. He says that he is doing everything he can to support his kids and it doesn’t help to have someone from the court system telling him how to parent them. He talks for ten minutes about his life challenges, his two jobs, his feelings. How he has been harmed. How he wants to be a better father.

The group listens attentively. When he finishes, Connors thanks him for speaking, tells him he heard him, that he understands his challenges and admires his efforts.

The session ends with the parties agreeing to meet again in January. After they leave, Connors says, “I don’t think the [father] from whom we heard testimony today would have been able to do that under the more traditional system.”

Peacemaking originated in tribal courts, and Connors is clear about the debt. “I continue to learn, whenever I can–from tribal elders, tribal teachers, tribal judges around the country,” he says.

He credits an important insight to Mark Wedge, a coauthor of a book he gave me called Peacemaking Circles: From Crime to Community. “Families put their trust into their communities. Communities put their trust into institutions. And from a Native point of view, this is where your breakdown occurs–those of you in the institutions, you forget that trust means responsibility.”

To reunify a family, “the person we’re trying to help really has to do some deep soul searching in an honest way. They aren’t going to do that in an adversarial system where people get up there and trash them in front of the judge.”

Like CASA, the Dispute Resolution Center has a small staff and a large group of volunteers, many of whom have trained as mediators. Executive director Belinda Dulin says they seek “to bring a group of people together who have an interest in keeping those children safe, and helping a family strengthen; to capitalize on their strengths and be a supportive community.”

She acknowledges that keeping a peacemaking circle together “can be a struggle. But we gravitate back to ‘why are we here?’ And that becomes our guiding light.”

CASAs, Connors says, were created on the theory “that those who are institutionally involved in child welfare cases are overworked or not doing their job.” He rejects that line of thought. “If the argument is, ‘Nobody’s doing their job,’ then we need people doing their job, including me.”

As for making recommendations about placing a child in foster care, he says, the law on terminating parental rights “is very clear”–and making that decision is “the responsibility of the judge.”

Foster care is his last resort. He says national figures show that 60 percent of children who age out of foster care without having been adopted or put in a permanent placement “end up in one of three ways: homeless, incarcerated, or dead. So when we talk about the traditional path, that path is fairly destructive for the youth we are all claiming we’re trying to keep safe.”

When the goal is family reunification–as it is, he says, in maybe 85 to 90 percent of Washtenaw County’s juvenile cases–then he thinks peacemaking is the way to go, if the parties are willing. Peacemaking is also an option in family court and probate court. Says Connors, “I think I should be available in every court, at some point.”

Attorney Steve Tramontin represents the father who spoke at the hearing I saw. He says the replacement of the CASA program with peacemaking is a “hot-button issue.” So far, though, he believes it’s a change for the better.

“At first peacemaking was tough for me,” he admits. Trained to protect his client from saying anything that might be used against him, “I was uneasy at the beginning.” But unless a threat is made, nothing that’s said in the peacemaking circle can be used as evidence in court. And as part of the circle his client “felt more a part of the care and problem solving” and less isolated.

“I began my career in this realm–at-risk families, indigent clients, court-�xADappointed work,” Tramontin says. “I have been able to see the gaps and barriers, the holes in the system.” In the traditional system, the parties would see caseworkers’ reports “just days before court and had no time to talk about them before the court session … we were responding or reviewing in the hallway. No digesting of information. Responses were knee-jerk, [with the two sides] throwing arrows back and forth.”

In the peacemaking circle, the parties “get these reports weeks in advance … We’re all looking at the reports and addressing things with each other. We eliminate issues that might be hard to address for the first time in court.

“The design and purpose of peacemaking is to have regular communication. Everybody has communication issues. If you’ve resolved the communication issues, it brings more clarity to the process.”

Tramontin is confident that peacemaking has helped his client and perhaps even healed some generational trauma and bad behavior. It “allows for the possibility of a creative solution to an ordinarily cookie-cutter process,” says Tramontin. “In the center is the community. In this process no stone is unturned.”

There’s been no creative solution to the rift between Connors and CASA. “Fast [family] reunifications and using dispute resolution techniques to address damaged families and traumatized children may be a dangerous combination,” Joyce Tesoriero warned in her letter to CASA volunteers and supporters. “Many of those who frequent the juvenile courtrooms in Washtenaw County fear that the children of the county could be put in harm’s way if Judge Connors’ power to control the juvenile court continues unchecked.”

Dulin points out that threats of abuse, neglect, or bodily harm are exceptions to the peacemaking circle’s confidentiality rule–her mediators are required to report them. And though Connors believes in peacemaking as strongly as Tesoriero believes in CASAs, he says that if it isn’t working, cases can be shifted back to the traditional adversarial track at any time.

As for the CASAs’ anger, Connors says, “I can’t speak to how others feel about how they were treated. When people say how I am or how I behave, it says more about them than it does about me … For all of us who are working for our youth, again it is about our youth, not about us.”

If CASAs want to continue to work with children in his court, he says, they should get trained at the Dispute Resolution Center.

Dulin says so far only two former CASAs have done that–and only one has become a peacemaker.