This page dedicated to: interstate child custody disputes, parental kidnapping, divorce cases, private investigator...
INTERSTATE CHILD CUSTODY DISPUTES
PARENTAL KIDNAPPING
The epidemic of child snatching in divorce cases crested more than two decades ago, while there are somewhat fewer such cases today, the problems associated with them have NOT yet disappeared. Your first problem if you are a searching parent is in finding a lawyer who isn't an idiot. The second one is in finding your child. The third problem, and typically the most difficult one, is in getting your children back once you have found them.
Bad information is abundant on child recoveries. If you are told to just take a copy of your custody order to the new state, it's BAD advice. Enforcement is seldom quite that automatic. And with a misstep you can, and indeed are LIKELY to find yourself in a new custody battle in the state where you children now are. That state may be hostile to parents in your situation. And you may lose custody. This is particularly true if your former spouse throws inflammatory allegations against you in the new state. That will at least buy them the time to pack up and move to yet another state where you can start afresh. After four or five states, hiring lawyers in every state it gets a bit pricey for most folks.
Few lawyers ever understood the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction Act (UCCJA) when it was the only vehicle a parent had to address the issue of more than one state potentially exercising jurisdiction over issues affecting the custody of their children. The understanding in the legal profession has seemed not to improve over the years. Congress enacted the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act (PKPA) to solve some of the misunderstanding and jurisdictional tugs of war between states. It didn't help! Recently there have come greater efforts to solve the problem of interstate child custody actions, which have put "enforcement" into the new acts currently in passage in many state legislatures. The Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction Enforcement Act (UCCJEA) was developed and is in the process of enactment in many states. The UCCJEA restates the purposes of the original UCCJA and tries to clarify the myriad of decisions by states that are all over the map in more ways than one on who has jurisdiction to do what in custody contests that stray across state lines. The new act, intended to clarify the provisions that limit jurisdiction to create havoc with custody decisions is already following the same path of misinterpretation that its predecessors did. It seems as though the more precise and direct the authors have tried to be in the language of the new act, the more confused most lawyers and judges have become with the narrower language. The UCCJEA was designed to close loopholes on the question of jurisdiction, instead it is being interpreted to widen the confusion that it was supposedly designed to eliminate.
Also if you use a private investigator to recover your children, you may wind up with Rambo. (Look for the gun under his jacket or elsewhere) We must mention the psychological problems caused to children in their often violent recoveries. It is much the same with police who aren't trained in psychology to help a child adjust to the recovery event. (A necessary process if the abduction has been more than a month.) An unskilled lawyer can involve you in custody fights in several states. These cases become the "Full Employment for Lawyers Act." We have encountered cases where a parent was forced to have lawyers in six states because none of their lawyers knew how to enforce custody decrees over state lines and the other parent kept skipping states when it appeared that they might lose. Instead of making the process simple, the clumsy lawyer creates interstate legal conflicts where none needed to exist because they are substantially ignorant of the laws. That is most true in states where the UCCJEA has just been enacted.
There is a better way, and we are it. If you are looking for a cheap answer, we don't have it. Our process is expensive, but less expensive than having your case screwed up by somebody who doesn't know Interstate Jurisdiction issues. Please call for help.
This page dedicated to: interstate child custody disputes, parental kidnapping, divorce cases, private investigator...