Court Opinion

ID: 9608285
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 03:08:48.24059+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:00:57.375046
License: Public Domain

Springer, J.,
dissenting:
This case represents another in a growing series of unlawful and unnecessary judicial terminations of the parental relationship. The termination here was unlawful because jurisdictional grounds for termination have not been established and unnecessary because it certainly cannot be said in this case that “ ‘under no reasonable circumstances [can] the [children’s] best interest ... be served by sustaining the parental tie.’ ” Greeson v. Barnes, 111 Nev. 1198, 1205, 900 P.2d 943, 948 (1995) (Springer, J., dissenting) (quoting Champagne v. Welfare Division, 100 Nev. 640, 652, 691 P.2d 849, 858 (1984)).
Two jurisdictional grounds have been asserted by the State in this case, abandonment and failure of parental adjustment. According to the applicable statute, before children can be adjudi*337cated as abandoned, the parent must be shown to have had a “settled purpose ... to forego all parental custody and relinquish all claims to the child.” NRS 128.012(1). The “settled purpose” of the mother in this case has not been to relinquish all claims to her children but, rather, steadfastly to maintain her maternal relationship at all costs. There is nothing in this record that would lead one to believe that this mother had the slightest intention, ever, to give up or to “relinquish ail claims” to her children. There is no way in which a factfinder could have concluded that this mother abandoned her children — unless one were to misapply the “presum[ption]” of abandonment contained in NRS 128.012(2).
A presumption is created by NRS 128.012(2) whereby the parental rights of disappearing parents can be terminated without the State’s being put to the proof of the parents’ intention and purpose to “relinquish all claims to the child.”1 Under NRS 128.012(2), if a wayward parent absconds and leaves a child “in the care and custody of another without provision for his support and without communication for a period of 6 months,” such a parent is “presumed to have intended to abandon the child.” (My emphasis.)2 Although the presumption might on rare occasions be employed to shift the burden of going forward on the abandonment issue to a respondent parent, to my way of thinking, the statutory presumption of abandonment was created principally to facilitate the termination process in cases where a parent disappears, incommunicado, leaving a child to be cared for by others and without providing any means for the child’s support. The presumption is not intended to effectuate parental severance in cases, like this one, in which a parent who has been temporarily indisposed and unable to attend to parental duties returns, claiming the right to restoration of parental custody.
*338We have seen a palpable disposition on the part of the family courts, largely endorsed by the decisions of this court, to interpret NRS 128.012(2) as virtually a conclusive presumption of abandonment, by which a six-months absence is equated by the family court to the jurisdictional ground of abandonment, notwithstanding a showing that the parent had a justification for the failure to communicate and demonstrated clearly that there was at no time even the slightest intention or “settled purpose ... to forego all parental custody and relinquish all claims to the child.”
This mother explained to the court (and it would appear from the transcript of the proceedings (see footnote 6) that the court believed her) that her failure to communicate was the direct result of the trauma that she sulfered by reason of her having witnessed, in the presence of her children, the brutal murder of her husband of twenty years and the father of the children. She told the court that her life became a “blur” after this experience and that she fled to California in confusion and in the fear that the murderer of her husband was going to kill her too. Part of her reaction to her husband’s murder was to return to a drug habit that had developed earlier in her life; and part of the period in which she remained incommunicado was spent in an eight-month residential drug rehabilitation program in which she was able to break her drug habit, rediscover her religious faith and restore her self confidence. When she left the drug rehabilitation center, she contacted Nevada welfare officials, telling them that she was ready and able to resume her parental duties. Nevada welfare officials told her, in effect, that she was too late, that termination proceedings had been commenced and that they intended to carry these proceedings through to completion.
Before coming to Nevada to get Destiny and Brittany, the mother’s other two children, Vanessa and Crystal, were returned to the mother by California welfare authorities, after her successful completion of the drug rehabilitation program. At this time it cannot be denied that she was leading a happy and productive life, residing with her other two daughters and with a dependable and caring man who was providing a father for her children. She begged the Nevada family court to allow her to keep her family together and not to separate her permanently from two of her four children and not to separate the sisters from each other. In response to her plea, the court ruled in favor of the State’s petition and decided that rather than permit the family to be united it would terminate her parental rights, split the family in two and order that two of Mrs. Gonzales’ daughters, Destiny and Brittany, should remain in foster care.
In this dissent I do not find it necessary to catalogue all of the travails of this unhappy mother, but a number of things remain *339clear throughout: Gloria Gonzales is not an unsuitable parent3; Gloria Gonzales did not abandon Destiny and Brittany; and Gloria Gonzales did not “fail to adjust” to programs imposed upon her by welfare authorities.4 Gloria Gonzales became temporarily incapacitated and then, as readily seen by the trial judge did “a lot of things that very few people are capable of doing” and successfully got her “life straightened back out.” What any reader of this record will readily see is a mother who got temporarily off track, a mother who did a remarkable job of getting back on track and a mother who deserves to have her family put back together again.
In this case the district court made it very clear that in concluding that there were jurisdictional grounds for termination it relied on the “presumption of abandonment under NRS 128.012” and the presumption in NRS 128.109 that if parental adjustment is not completed within six months there is presumption of a failure to adjust. If the trial court had not (incorrectly, I believe) invoked these presumptions, there would be no basis at all for the action taken by the family court in this case.
The mother in this case creditably overcame almost overwhelming obstacles. She was able to put her life together and to persuade California officials to place her other two daughters back into her home, only to be told when she came to Nevada that it was too late and that, as put by the trial judge, Destiny and Brittany “have bonded to [a new] family.” I suggested in another dissent to another unlawful and unnecessary severance of natural parental rights, that the “State seems to be running amok, spouting pop psychology and terminating parental rights in cases where it is clearly not necessary to do, particularly in cases of poor and otherwise handicapped parents.” Matter of Parental Rights as to Deck, 113 Nev. 124, 930 P.2d 760 (1997). I see the same pattern in the present case. I see emerging in this state a *340new, unconstitutional standard for termination of parental rights: If children in foster care “bond”5 with their foster parents, it’s “goodbye forever” to the natural parents. It is regrettable indeed that this court, now to be followed by the trial courts, have abandoned the constitutional mandates of Champagne and San-tosky and are apparently willing to permit parental rights to be terminated in virtually any case in which children are found to be agreeably ensconced and bonded in a foster home.
As I see the present case, the family court judge reasoned as follows: The children were doing well in their foster home; it was not in their best interests at the time for them to leave that home and, therefore, the parental rights of the children’s mother must be terminated. This reasoning, of course, is legally and constitutionally unacceptable. Even if there had been an abandonment or a failure to adjust in this case (I do not see how there could possibly have been either, under the circumstances of this case), the district court would not have been empowered to terminate parental rights unless it were able to conclude that under no reasonable circumstances was the child’s welfare and best interest served by sustaining parental ties. Champagne v. Welfare Division, 100 Nev. 640, 691 P.2d 849 (1984). It is inconceivable that any court could find in this case that there was no way in which the children’s best interests could be served only by taking them permanently away from this mother. In my view, just the opposite is true. The children’s best interests would be served by preserving the natural parental rights and keeping this mother and her four children together in one home. All that the trial court found with regard to the necessary element that the children’s interests could not be served by leaving the maternal ties intact was:
The Court does not find that it is in the best interests of the children to place them back with Mrs. Gonzales. The Court *341does find by clear and convincing evidence that the disposi-tional ground has been met by the State and that the best interest of these children is clearly served by ordering the termination in this case and allowing them to continue that life they have had without concern and without future worry from what may or may not happen in the very unstable life of Mrs. Gonzales.[6]
The foregoing recital, far from holding that there is no way to serve the children’s best interest short of legal severance of the maternal relationship, merely holds that in the court’s opinion it is not in the best interest of the children at that time that they be removed from the foster home. Such a finding is immaterial in a termination case and is, as stated, a far cry from concluding that this mother’s parental rights must be forever severed because under no circumstances could allowing her to continue her maternal relationship with Destiny and Brittany be in their best interest.
In the recent epidemic of terminations of parental rights of poor and handicapped parents, this is one of the best examples of when parental rights should not be terminated; therefore, again, I dissent.

The phrase “relinquish all claims to the child” is part of the definition of abandonment contained in NRS 128.012(1).

First, I would note that the statute does not create a presumption of abandonment but, rather, a presumption to abandonment. The provision relating to the act of leaving a child without support and the provision relating to the intention to abandon, evidenced by a failure to communicate, are in the disjunctive. Although during the period that this mother was in residential treatment, she admits to her failure to communicate with welfare authorities, she has certainly rebutted any claim that she intended. I find neither proof nor court finding to support the act of abandonment, to “leave the child in the care and custody of another without provision for his support.” Although it appears that there was a period during which this mother did not actually pay child support, it would not appear that she just “left,” leaving the children with no provision for support. The children were certainly being provided for at the time of the disruption in this mother’s life, and she did not simply “take off” and “leav[e] [her children] without provision for [their] support.”

“[W]e must remember that poverty, sickness, and other such eventualities may result in the separation of children of a loving and quite suitable parent. There is always the risk that passage of time might result in a situation in which a child develops new relationships — becomes “integrated” into a foster family or otherwise becomes estranged from natural parents. Caution must be exercised not to allow termination proceedings to be carried out absent a showing of unsuitability on the part of the parent by reason of the parent’s fault or incapacitation.” Champagne, 100 Nev. at 651, 691 P.2d at 857.

As discussed in the text any supposed abandonment or failure to adjust in the case is attributable to the stormy period in her life during which she was admittedly out of contact with her children and unable to attend to the specific duties to “adjust,” which were imposed upon her by welfare authorities. Mrs. Gonzales never willfully had a “purpose” to relinquish her parental rights nor to flout the authority of the Division of Child and Family Services.

“Bond” and “bonding” are pop psychology terms taken from the pop psychology best-seller, Beyond the Best Interests of the Child, a somewhat antiquated paperback that proposes an unproved psychological theory that the best interests of children are served by terminating natural parents’ parental rights and permanently investing parental rights in the children’s foster parents, in cases in which children have “bonded” with these surrogate parents. Joseph Goldstein, Anna Freud, and Albert Solnit, Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (1973). Whatever may be the validity of this psychological theory, its direct application to permanently depriving natural parents of their children just because they have “bonded” (whatever that means) to someone else is contrary to our law and violative of our federal Constitution. See, for example, Santosky v. Kramer, 455 U.S. 745 (1978), which recognizes a fundamental property right in parenthood and, in my opinion, prohibits the permanent severance of parental relationships merely because children have “bonded” with some one other than their natural parents.

The quoted recital by the court seems to me to be very much at odds with the court’s appraisal of Mrs. Gonzales as a person. The court addressed Mrs. Gonzales in this manner:
I am in awe to some degree of your— of the steps that you have taken to get your life straightened back out. You have done a lot of things very few people are capable of doing. ... I was impressed with your testimony. I was impressed with your efforts. In all candor, I believe that you’re very sincere. I don’t think you’re putting me on, nor do I think you ’re at some point going to relapse.
(My emphasis.)