Monday, December 28, 2015

Colorado terminates dad's rights

The Colorado supreme court just ruled against a dad:
1. This appeal is about two little boys and the question of who will be their parents.M.C. was unaware that he had become a father to twin boys because the children’s biological mother, J.Z., had previously told him that she had suffered a miscarriage. Subsequently, J.Z. relinquished her parental rights and in doing so provided false information about the identity of the biological father. As a result, the trial court terminated M.C.’s parental rights and the children were placed for adoption. T.W. and A.W., who were unaware of J.Z.’s deception, then adopted the children. After M.C. learned that he was the children’s father and that the children had been adopted, he petitioned the court to void the termination of his parental rights based on J.Z.’s fraudulent statements. The court reinstated M.C.’s parental rights, and he sought to gain custody of the children. Because the birth mother had relinquished her rights and consented to the twins’ adoption, the case proceeded to trial to determine if termination of M.C.’s parental rights under section 19-5-105, C.R.S. (2015), was appropriate.

2. After a two-day bench trial, the trial court found, pursuant to section 19-5-105(3.1)(c), that M.C. had failed to promptly take substantial responsibility for the children and that termination was in the best interests of the children. Therefore, the trial court terminated M.C.’s parental rights and awarded custody of the children to the adoptive parents. ...

JUSTICE EID, dissenting.

60. Today the majority affirms the trial court’s termination of M.C.’s parental rights based on the insufficiency of his $250 payment to the adoptive parents during the three months following the restoration of his rights. If this seems like an exceedingly slim reed upon which to base a termination of parental rights order, that is because it is. The reed becomes even slimmer considering the trial court “informally” raised the issue of child support but never settled a dispute over whether the adoptive parents were required to disclose financial information to set the amount of child support; in other words, the issue was never formally settled.

Robert Franklin has posted rants against this decision here, here, and here.

No need to read the details. The mom gave up her rights, and this was the dad against two strangers who had taken advantage of dishonesty to take possession of his kids.

So what was the dad's fault? He only paid $250 to the two strangers! He should not have paid them anything.

He spent money on the kids when he was permitted to visit them, and he had to spend money on travel and legal expenses. He just didn't voluntarily hand a lot of cash to the couple that had effectively kidnapped his kids.

There is also some justification in terms of the Best Interest of the Child (BIOTCh). The court said that the dad is black, and that he and his fiancee did not have a psychological plan for the kids moving to live in a black family. I guess the adoptive parents are white and the kids are half-black. The kids are 3 years old now, as the case has been going on for 3 years.

40 years ago, psychologists were arguing that white couples should not be adopting black kids.

I cannot stand this crap anymore. Read Franklin if you need an explanation of what is wrong in this case.

Update: Franklin has another rant on this today. More proof that an anti-father ideology controls the courts.

Monday, December 21, 2015

Dad wants opinion to be forgotten

I just received a request from a fellow angry dad to remove his name from my blog.

I get these requests occasionally, which is odd because almost everyone is anonymous. The only names come from published news stories

Europe has a Right to be forgotten, where you can sometimes force Google to remove listings from their search engine.

This guy just wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper, pointing out some of the bad incentives of the family court. Now he says that the court is holding this against him, as apparently anyone with an opinion about the family court must be an inferior parent.

A problem with the men's rights movement is that very few men want to be recognized as a men's rights activist.

The problem is even worse with Child Protective Services. There could be millions of people who disapprove of CPS, but no one wants to defend accused child abusers.

How far does this go? I can imagine a company not hiring someone because a web search showed that he once made some pro-Trump comments on Facebook. The company might be concern that a future discrimination lawsuit might find the posting, and argue that the company managers are bigots.

Since Google, Facebook, Apple, and others are destroying our privacy, I would expect that soon most people will have embarrassing things in their past, and others will get bored by it all.

The guy who asked to have his name removed did not even say anything embarrassing. He was just writing in favor of shared custody, and against court policies that make it more difficult.

I really doubt that he is going to lose child custody because of such an opinion, but court officials can arbitrarily consider whatever they want, and he was concerned enuf to write to me.

It is a sad day when a man has to repudiate a letter to a newspaper editor because he wants to see his kids.

Thursday, December 17, 2015

Actress loses final decision

I previously reported, in 2012, 2014, and 2015, on this actress whose scorched-earth sole custody tactics backfired. The dad won a final decision:
Kelly Rutherford has lost custody of her two children with a Monaco judge making a final decision on the lengthy legal case that has seen her locked in litigation with her ex-husband for more than six years. ...

As per the ruling, Rutherford will also receive $3,281 a month from Giersch in maintenance.

“I think like any parent would feel, you know”.

As she exited the Monacan court, Rutherford, who founded the Children’s Justice Campaign to help families with similar legal issues, told the waiting paparazzi that she “had no words”.
She stole the kids, got him deported, and got the American media on her side. I don't know why she is getting support payments, if he has the kids and she is a successful Hollywood actress.

The news article might have been machine-translated. It is getting harder to tell.

Most readers blame the parents, but the fault is really with the legal system for creating a 6-year process for a high-stakes winner-take-all battle for proving who is the better parent. But I have given up making this point. I only post this because I previously followed the case.

Update: (Dec. 30) Dad sues Vanity Fair in Germany for libel, as it took the mom's side.

Monday, December 07, 2015

Texas child support collection monster

The child support collection system is a monster, with both the feds and states to blame. It has a glitch in Texas:
The federal government has frozen payments to Texas’ problem-plagued bid to upgrade its child-support data system, Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office disclosed Friday.

In a letter to Legislative Budget Board director Ursula Parks, a top Paxton aide said the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement has halted payments for tech giant Accenture’s part of the data project, known as “T2.”

Federal officials want more information about a proposed new work schedule and a “corrective action plan” that would explain “the root causes of delays on this program and how they will be addressed moving forward,” said Mara F. Friesen, Texas’ deputy attorney general for child support. ...

The federal government pays two-thirds of the costs of the upgrade,
The cost is many millions of dollars:
By 2012, agency officials realized that the project's costs were far higher than expected, and concerns were growing about Accenture's handling of its share of the work. By this summer, the project's price tag had grown by more than $70 million. The current estimate for the project is $310 million, more than $100 million above the initial $202 million budget, according to the attorney general's office. ...

More than half of the attorney general’s budget goes to child support enforcement. For years, the agency has prided itself on being the national leader in child support collections.

Millions of parents and thousands of state employees rely on the office’s computer system to handle the complicated and often delicate aspects of managing child support cases, including locating parents, collecting payments and distributing funds to custodial parents. But the technology rests on a rickety, 20-year-old framework that becomes more unwieldy with every passing year. Agency officials say the system is slow, convoluted and difficult when it comes to training new employees.
Wow, I had no idea this was such a big operation. Texas has criminals, illegal aliens, drug dealers, and all sorts of problems for prosecutors, and they are spending most of their money on child support enforcement?!

The legal evils of child support are detailed in Real World Divorce, a draft book that is freely online.