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Supervised Visitation Network

Based on long experience with NCP and her relationships with family members including her children, my guess is that she will probably choose to ignore the child for several months or longer. She is not making phone contact currently, made no attempt to exercise Easter visitation, and will probably make no attempt to exercise summer 2006 visitation or, possibly, the next Thanksgiving and spring visitations.

However, she tends to re-initiate contact with ostracized family members (her mother, sister, sons) after a year or two or three. I think it very possible that she could simply call up in spring 2007 or 2008 and say that she'll be taking her summer visitation as it is in the court orders. She might wait even four or five years--the old court order would feel like a Sword of Damocles hanging over the child's head. (NCP has a long memory and will exact serious punishment the next time she has the child in her care unsupervised.)

By summer 2007 we will almost certainly no longer be living in this county (where the child abuse report was issued and where the therapist who first reported and who has been working with the child in the subsequent months lives) or even in CO. Obviously the report of founded child abuse gets older each year as well.

I also worry that we cannot depend upon the policy of the DA's office remaining exactly the same over the next seven years. (The child is nine and a half years old.)

1) Given this information and these considerations, does the strategy of waiting for NCP to try and exercise visitation seem risky?

2) Does this leave domestication and modification--done pro se or by a local attorney, but moving as quickly as possible--as the only sensible alternative?

Thanks very much for the response. It gives me a lot of food for thought, so I'll have to think it over--I know I'll have more questions later.

I know I've asked about this a couple times, but I'm still trying to figure out the smoothest way of doing this.

The divorce decree and all court orders in this case were issued in a New York State court. I live in Colorado and have custody of the minor child. The order gives the NCP, currently living in New Hampshire, summer and holiday visitation three times a year, plus a never-used right to visitation in my area with reasonable notice.

Social Services in my county has issued a founded report of sexual abuse against the NCP--inappropriate touching--and recommended only supervised visitation pending treatment etc.

The abuse took place where NCP used to live in Massachusetts; the police have completed their criminal investigation, and the detective in charge has called and told me that the DA will leave it up to me whether or not to prosecute. According to her, I can call up the DA and say, "Go ahead, let's do it," any time before the seven-year statute of limitations runs out. A conviction would ruin NCP's career as a physician and imperil NCP's immigration status.

Social Services says they cannot (or will not) file a "Dependency and Neglect" petition to prevent NCP's unsupervised contact. It is unclear whether this is because NCP is not a Colorado resident or because the abuse took place out of state or because the child is safe with her CP, me. I have asked if this is because they don't consider the offense (fondling) serious enough--they have assured me it has nothing to do with the severity of the offense. They consider this a case that should be acted upon; they believe the child has to be protected.

Given the extremely high estimates I have been quoted so far (I live in a very rural area with few choices in family law attorneys) for domestication of my New York State case and modification of the order, I am considering going pro se--thus my earlier post.

The only purpose of domesticating my decree here would be this modification. I will probably not stay in Colorado over a year longer, and really would just as soon leave the case in NY.

But I wonder if there is an even easier alternative. NCP has declared at least twice--to the police and to an adult child--that she does not want to see the minor child any more. NCP spent a huge amount of money on the custody battle four or five years ago--firing one attorney who told her she had no choice but to settle and finding a firm willing to spend as much money as she would give them. She ended up hiring back the previous attorney to negotiate the post-trial agreement, which gave her less than she could have settled for. Although communication and relations have been bad since then, NCP has never gone back to court, and all evidence suggests she sees the legal arena as a place she can't win.

So I am thinking of writing a letter to NCP, suggesting that my attorney in NY write up a stipulated change in the visitation order, following the recommendations of Social Services. I would emphasize that I wouldn't like to see her go to jail or have career problems, but that the authorities will not accept her "I don't want to see her" as sufficient and the visitation order will have to be changed.

Knowing NCP, I think there is a decent chance of this appealing to her. It has to be a letter, because she will not let me get a word in edgewise on the phone. I will write in her native language, which she and I spoke together, so that it will seem more informal than previous letters I've written about issues that came in during visitation.


1) Can NCP and I stipulate such a change to the parenting plan, and can we file it with the court of the old state without changing jurisdiction?

2) Is there any possible harm in me writing such a letter to NCP? What are the possible dangers? May I eventually post the English draft for your comments?

I'll ask the clerk's office if there's a family law facilitator--I called them up today because I couldn't find the right form on line and they themselves were very helpful.

This isn't actually about child support. That process has been working just fine (in bureaucratic terms at least)--Massachusetts collects it from the New Hampshire employer (I assume), sends it to Lousiana, and they send me a check in Colorado. As long as Massachusetts and Louisiana are happy with this arrangement, I'm happy--since I don't have the delay of starting off the case with a new state or two.

This is about modifying the parenting time order in order to limit the other parent to supervised visitation, pending treatment, following the recommendation of the local child protective services agency. Once the order is domesticated, I'll start working on a modification here.

1) Does that (the fact that this isn't a child support matter) change your advice at all?

2) I know the clerk's office or the family law facilitator can only answer certain kinds of questions. Can they give me a sense of how long various stages of this process tend to take in this court? Is that a legitimate question to ask them?

The divorce took place in New York State, and the decree and all related orders were made by a court in that state. No parties to the case have had their residence in New York State for at least three years. (During a few months of this period my ex did have two temporary jobs in different towns in NY, while maintaining a primary residence in Massachussetts.)

In January my ex moved to take up a permanent job in New Hampshire, giving up her Massachussetts apartment.

I and the minor child lived in Louisiana from summer 2000 to summer 2005. We and my wife now live in Colorado in a condo I own, although during the school year I frequently travel to Louisiana to work. I do not own a residence in Louisiana (although I have been provided with the use of a FEMA trailer). My child has attended school in Colorado since the start of the 2005-2006 school year.

I need to domesticate my NY divorce in Colorado (in order to modify it). I can assume that my ex will not cooperate if I need any documentation of when her move away from NY took place.

I have found the instructions for filing a foreign decree on the Colorado court system's web-site.

1) Is domestication of an out-of-state order under these circumstances something that an intelligent and compulsively precise layperson should be able to accompllish? That is, is it reasonable to try and do this myself?

I don't know if this helps clarify things, but in his first post, the OP wrote:
> 2) CP signed an affidavit indicating that prior to the final
>judgement, I did not pay child support directly to CP. (I have
>checks to prove otherwise and would like to reduce child
>support arrears based on that).

The OP's point, I believe, was that the CP signed a false affidavit claiming that they had received no child support directly from the CP. Does this change anything?

Thanks very much for the help clarifying this jurisdiction question!

Again, thanks loads! We're narrowing down the question as we go.

I have been employed at the same fulltime job in LA for over twenty years. I do not own a residence there, but I am currently the official resident of a FEMA trailer located by my workplace.

In CO, my daughter, my wife and I live in a vacation condo I have owned for several years, and my daughter attends school in CO.

If we move back to LA, we will still spend several weeks each year (and probably most of the summer) in CO.

The mother would be unlikely ever to file to switch jurisdiction from CO to LA, since she hates LA and likes visiting CO.

1) Based on this information, can I show I have a permanent residence in LA and that I am only temporarily absent from that jurisdiction, so that I can file in LA?

2) Or, if CO assumes jurisdiction, can it remain there indefinitely even if we tend to spend the school year in LA?

Thanks so much for the quick reply, Soc!

At least some supervised visitation in CO would not be financially untenable for the mother, if she could bring herself to do it. Barring any new criminal conviction, she will continue to earn a very high salary as an internal medicine physician and has money to burn. Fortunately she's unlikely to want to burn more money in family court--after throwing away probably 30-40 thousand on the six-day custody trial (she had two out-of-town attorneys present at all times, and they brought in five or six expert witnesses).

I've been reluctant to change jurisdiction for several reasons:

* I have an absolutely first-rate attorney in NY.

* the judge and law guardian there are well acquainted with the mother's antics in the courthouse--for example, the judge knows to have bailiffs ready to protect the mother's attorney from the mother if necessary.

* the mother has already gone through most or all of the other family law attorneys in that small town, and had to go out of town to get a law firm unscrupulous enough to waste her money on the custody trial. The attorney there she's most likely to use is a realist, and will not pursue hopeless causes. She may tend to listen to him because five years ago he told her she had no choice but to settle, before she fired him and went to the out-of-town firm. After that firm spent so much of her money, lost her the case, and finally petitioned the court to release them from representing her based on inability to cooperate, she rehired the local attorney to negotiate the final details.

* we will not remain in CO beyond summer 2007, and may return to Louisiana or possibly move to the UK in summer 2006.

On the other hand, I suspect our CO county's DSS's report will carry greater weight and be more credible in a court in our county, rather than out-of-state.

1) Given these details, would you still recommend changing jurisdiction to CO? Or do we have no choice?

2) If we change jurisdiction, does it begin with our NY attorney filing a motion to this effect back in NY? Or do we begin by filing a motion here in CO?