Opinion ID: 1854358
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: To strip the father of custody of his child, the trial court improperly alters the standards this Court set out in Ex parte Terry.

Text: Perhaps because the applicable law and precedent so clearly require courts to minimize their involvement in matters of family government and parental authority, the trial court in the instant case does formally acknowledge the principle of the father's prima facie right to custody, as stated in Ex parte Terry. But the trial court undermines this acknowledgment in practice by impermissibly altering the Ex parte Terry standard to strip the father of his right. On the issue of fitness, for example, rather than meet the burden of proof of showing by clear and convincing evidence the father's lack of fitness at the time of its ruling, the trial court's order reveals an impermissible shift of the burden of proof to the father to prove that he is fit to have custody: [The father] has succeeded in giving this court not one positive reason to place the child in his custody. (Emphasis in original.) The lower court's treatment of the father as unfit until proven fit is analogous to a court's changing the governing standard in a criminal case to guilty until proven innocent. [19] Similarly, the trial court's treatment of voluntary relinquishment of custody also involves an improper alteration of this Court's standard to justify stripping the father of his right to custody. Although the trial court's order initially cites the correct standard of voluntary relinquishment of custody, it invents a different standard when it finds that both parents voluntarily abandoned their parental responsibilities.  (Emphasis added.) To be sure, custody is a parental responsibility. But it is only one among many, and a parent conceivably could voluntarily abandon a dozen parental responsibilities, yet not voluntarily abandon the one parental responsibility  custody  that is specified by the Ex parte Terry standard at issue before us. That the trial court failed to find the requisite abandonment of custody is telling; that the court still stripped the father of his parental rights may be treated as conclusive proof of its judicial overreach. I do not doubt that the trial court was sincerely motivated by what it regarded as the best interest of the child when it ordered the removal of the father's right to custody. The best intentions, however, do not grant a lower court authority to alter the lawful judicial standards of this state. The best intentions also do not permit a lower court to employ those altered standards to strip the father of all custody rights when no party to the case so requested. That is because, absent such a request, the father has not received notice of the potential loss of all of his custody rights, and he has not had the opportunity to defend himself in court from that prospect. Even the child's maternal grandparents, who opposed the father's petition for sole custody (and thus had every incentive to support a judicially imposed reduction or removal of the father's rights), declined to petition the trial court to strip the father of all custody rights. The maternal grand-parents recognized that the child's interests would be served best by having his father at least continue to share custody. Because the grandparents recognized this despite their personal conflicts of interest, the trial judge should have deferred to their superior knowledge of the family circumstances, just as appellate courts ordinarily accord trial courts a presumption of correctness based on their relatively superior experience with a case.