Court Opinion

ID: 9628926
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 09:34:29.640124+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:07:13.100320
License: Public Domain

Springer, C. J.,
dissenting:
Amidst very tough competition, I nominate this case as the worst misapplication of the law relating to termination of parental rights that has emanated from this court.
The case involves two very immature teen-agers who had a child out of wedlock. When the mother, Veronica, was a high-school senior, she became pregnant. She had told her boyfriend, Shawn Whitney, on a number of previous occasions, that she believed herself to be pregnant. These statements turned out to be false, and Shawn had no reason to believe that she was telling the truth when she finally did become pregnant in October of 1995. As late as January 25, 1996, Shawn’s mother, Linda, according to the majority opinion, “maintained that ‘she still felt [the pregnancy] was a hoax.’ ” Nonetheless, a baby girl was born on May 29, 1996.
On June 25, 1996, one Teresa Pinney, who had talked Veronica into giving her baby away to her, filed a petition to terminate Shawn’s rights as father of the baby.1 Ultimately Shawn’s paternity was established by DNA testing, and it would appear that after Shawn became satisfied that he was in fact the father, he acted diligently to protect his legal rights as a father. He vigorously contested Ms. Pinney’s attempts to take his daughter away from him and, on August 28, 1996, traveled three thousand miles to appear in court to contest Ms. Pinney’s attempts to take his child away from him. Then again, on February 12, 1997, Shawn traveled from New Jersey to Las Vegas to appear in an eviden-tiary hearing in opposition to Ms.Pinney’s petition to terminate his parental rights. In addition to this, on August 30, 1996, Shawn filed his own “Motion for Custody or in the Alternative for Visitation.” Shawn completed a baby care class and purchased clothing and furniture for the child. It is hard to imagine a father who was more interested in maintaining his parental ties than Shawn was.
The majority opinion focuses on Shawn’s conduct and attitude *378during Veronica’s pregnancy, faulting Shawn for not being more attentive to his girlfriend during her pregnancy. In this case, it does not really make much of a difference whether the trial court did or did not take into consideration Shawn’s pre-birth attitude toward Veronica’s claimed pregnancy because, overall, it is very clear that Shawn did everything possible to protect his parental rights, once he realized that he was the father of this child. To argue, under the circumstances of this case, that Shawn “abandoned” his child (which is to say, under NRS 128.012(1) that he had a “settled purpose ... to forego all parental custody and relinquish all claims to the child”) is without any basis in fact. Shawn exhibited absolutely no intention at any time to give up his daughter. How the trial court and this court could possibly have concluded that Shawn abandoned his daughter and that this fact had been proven by clear and convincing evidence is extremely hard to understand.
The majority does not discuss the other, asserted jurisdictional grounds for termination (risk of injury to the child and “token” efforts by Shawn to be a parent); so I will not discuss them either, except to say that I have found no one who pretends to understand what the term “token efforts” might mean in the context of termination proceedings, and certainly there is nothing even close to a showing that this child would be in danger of “injury” if Shawn’s parental rights were not permanently eradicated.
With regard to dispositional grounds, the majority merely concludes that the child’s best interests would be served by permanently depriving Shawn of his parental rights. This, of course, is not sufficient to justify a termination of parental rights; and it is certainly not possible to say that “under no reasonable circumstances [may] the child’s best interest be served by sustaining the parental tie” of the child’s father. Champagne v. Welfare Division, 100 Nev. 640, 652, 691 P.2d 849, 858 (1984).
There is no just cause why Ms. Pinney should be permitted to get away with this legally-sanctioned abduction of Shawn’s baby. I dissent.

Shawn has not raised the question of respondent Pinney’s standing to file a termination proceeding less than one month after the baby was born and before any adoption proceeding had been instituted. 1 cannot imagine what interest Pinney had at that time in terminating Shawn's rights to the baby. This point is not raised by the appellant; so I will not discuss it further.