Few Options to Detention for Kids Who Missed Lunch with Dad: Judge

PLYMOUTH, MI – Oakland Circuit Judge Lisa Gorcyca defended her decision to send three Bloomfield Hills children to a juvenile detention center for refusing to have lunch with their father last summer, and told the Judicial Tenure Commission hearing misconduct allegations against her that she had run out of options in the long-simmering child custody dispute.

Retired Wayne County Judge Daniel Ryan is conducting the hearing under way in Plymouth’s 35th District Court. If the allegations in a two-count complaint against Gorcyca are substantiated, she could be disciplined.

Gorcyca is accused of misconduct and for making false statements to the commission in response to its initial inquiry into her handling of the custody dispute involving the children of Maya Eibschitz-Tsimhoni, of Bloomfield Hills and Omer Tsimhoni ,of West Bloomfield.

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The complaint called Gorcyca out for various judicial indiscretions, including allegedly citing the Tsimhoni children's cult-like behavior, including once when she referenced notorious killer Charles Manson.

Gorcyca has apologized for a “display of frustration,” admitting that she was at times “exasperated” by the case.

The Tsimhoni children’s parents divorced in 2011, when full custody was given to their mother.

Omer Tsimhoni was granted visitation privileges, but when the children — boys, ages 14 and 11, a girl, 9 — refused to have anything to do with him, he accused his ex-wife of turning them against him and asked the court to grant him full custody.

Gorcyca’s attorney, Tom Cranmer, said the only thing she is guilty of is “caring too much,” according to reports in The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press.

“Did there come a point in time when Judge Gorcyca perhaps was a little bit irritated, perhaps was a little frustrated, perhaps had gotten to a point where she had no other tools left in the toolbox after exhausting every other opportunity for the children to simply obey her orders? Yeah I think so," Cranmer said. "But that cannot be and that wasn’t and that isn’t judicial misconduct.”

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