Court Opinion

ID: 9684703
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 14:08:36.665474+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:17:58.973757
License: Public Domain

HARTEN, Judge
(concurring specially).
I agree with the result here — termination of appellant’s parental rights (TPR) is in the children’s best interests. But, unfortunately, the judicial process disregarded the supreme court’s admonition in P.R.L. that staying the adjudication of TPR petitions implicates a parent’s right to due process. As the supreme court noted, no statute or rule provides authority for a stay in TPR proceedings. P.R.L., 622 N.W.2d at 543. And such a stay may hold out an unlikely hope for reunification, thus pressuring a parent to forgo his or her constitutionally protected right to a trial on the merits of the petition. “It is particularly troubling to stay entry of a permanency order ... where the problem that led to termination was one of such *612long standing and the prospects of success during a stay so dim as to make the court, through its agreement to the stay, a party to fruitless delay.” Id. at 544. This language applies in the instant case, where the stay was conditioned on appellant’s ability to maintain sobriety by overcoming a longstanding history of chemical abuse and treatment failures. Unfortunately, such stays are not expressly prohibited. Even so, the lack of established procedural standards governing stayed TPR dispositions creates problematic due process concerns for court administration of (including vacation of) the stay. Here, as in almost all such TPR stays, nothing was accomplished but an unwarranted continuation of the children’s hardship and uncertainty.