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NY Family Court Judge Takes Co-Parent Rights a Step Further in Filiation Case

Posted on: June 16th, 2017 by Art Leonard No Comments

Rockland County Family Court Judge Rachel E. Tanguay, ruling on a question of first impression under New York Law, decided that when a lesbian couple had children together and raised them together as a family for several years before splitting up, the co-parent was entitled to an Order of Filiation recognizing her parental status for all purposes. Judge Tanguay’s ruling in A.F. v. K.H., 2017 N.Y. Slip Op. 27196, 2017 WL 2541877 (Fam. Ct., Rockland Co., May 25, 2017), takes New York law one step further than the Court of Appeals’ landmark 2016 decision in Brooke S.B. v. Elizabeth A.C.C., 28 N.Y.3d 1, which had overruled a 25-year-old precedent to hold that a co-parent can seek custody and visitation in such a situation.

A.F. and K.H. became registered domestic partners on August 25, 2005, according to the findings of a Family Court Attorney Referee at an earlier stage of this case, and they decided to have children, with K.H. becoming pregnant through donor insemination with sperm from an anonymous donor. The women had two children whom they raised together until separating in July 2011, ironically right around the time that the New York Marriage Equality Law went into effect.  There was no dispute that they considered each other to be “parents” of both children.  In fact, when the children were born they were given A.F.’s surname. But after the break-up, K.H. resisted A.F.’s assertion of parental rights and even took the step of getting the court to change the children’s surname to hers.  A.F. sued to preserve her contact with the children.

At that time, the binding precedent in New York courts was Alison D. v. Virginia M., 77 N.Y.2d 651, a Court of Appeals ruling from 1991, which had been recently reaffirmed by the court in 2010, under which a person in the position of A.F. was deemed to be a “legal stranger” to the children who did not have standing under the Domestic Relations Law to seek custody or visitation. As a result, A.F.’s lawsuit was unsuccessful, with the Appellate Division affirming the trial court’s dismissal of her case in 2014.  From that point forward, A.F. had no contact with the children until her new lawsuit got underway.

After the Court of Appeals decided Brooke S.B., overruling Alison D. and providing that under certain circumstances a lesbian co-parent would have standing to seek custody and/or visitation with children she had been raising with her former partner, A.F. decided to try again. In her new custody case, she also sought a formal Order of Filiation from the court that would confer on her full parental rights for all legal purposes, not just custody and visitation.  This ultimately was the sticking point in the case, because after it was clear that the Family Court was going to apply Brooke S.B. to allow A.F. to revive her custody and visitation claims, K.H. agreed to a negotiated settlement about custody and visitation.

That left the Order of Filiation as the only issue for Judge Tanguay to decide. K.H., and the attorney appointed by the court to represent the children’s interest, continued to strongly oppose such an order.  Under an Order of Filiation, A.F. would have equal rights to participate in all significant parenting decisions, extending to such matters as education, medical care, inheritance and other circumstances where parental status may be significant, and she could also object to any adoption of the children by a new partner or spouse of K.H.

In Brooke S.B., the court carefully acknowledged “limited circumstances in which such a person has standing as a ‘parent’ under Section 70” of the Domestic Relations Law. “Specifically,” wrote Tanguay, “the Court rejected ‘a test that will apply in determining standing as a parent for all non-biological, non-adoptive, non-marital ‘parents’ who are raising children.”  Instead, in a cautious way, the court narrowed its decision to the precise facts of the case before it, and wrote, “We stress that this decision addresses only the ability of a person to establish standing as a parent to petition for custody or visitation.”  Seizing upon this language, K.H. argued that the Court of Appeals had not ruled that a person in A.F.’s position was entitled to be recognized as a parent for all purposes.

“At first blush,” wrote Tanguay, “it would appear that the Court of Appeals in Brooke was attempting to limit its holding to conferring standing to a party only.” But, she pointed out, the court reached this point by “broadening the definition of ‘parent’ to include a non-biological, non-legal ‘parent’ under certain circumstances.”  And the court got there by tracing the evolution of case law and statutes, including, of course the 2011 Marriage Equality Act.  Indeed, the Brooke S.B. decision came more than a year after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry, in an opinion that stressed the importance to children being raised by same-sex couples of having two legally recognized parents.

In Brooke, itself, Judge Eugene Pigott, concurring with the court, wrote, “Today, a child born to a married person by means of artificial insemination with the consent of the other spouse is deemed to be the child of both spouses, regardless of the couple’s sexual orientation.” So the issue in this case was whether to bring that one step further to cover same-sex couples who had their children and split up before marriage equality was available in New York.  Although A.F. and K.H. were registered domestic partners, that status under local law did not import any legal parental rights, which are a matter of state law.  Ultimately, Judge Tanguay concluded, the lack of a modern statutory scheme that would explicitly handle this situation is “manifestly unfair not only to the non-biological parent, but to the children who deserve to have a two-parent family when same was intended at their conception.”  The best interests of the children should be the overriding factor.

“The majority in Brooke concluded its opinion by stating, ‘We will no longer engage in the deft legal maneuvering necessary to read fairness into an overly-restrictive definition of parent that sets too high a bar for reaching a child’s best interest and does not take into account equitable principles,’” wrote Tanguay, who continued: “This court will not allow legal maneuvering that permits A.F. to be a ‘parent’ for purposes of custody, visitation and child support, but without more.  It is simply inequitable, and not consistent with prevailing common law as set for herein.”

She granted A.F.’s petition and decreed that the court “issue an Order of Filiation for each child listing A.F. as their legal parent forthwith.”

A.F. is represented by Sherri Donovan of New York City. K.H. is represented by Adrienne J. Orbach of White Plains.  Shiza Khan of New City, N.Y., served as appointed Attorney for the Children.  K.H. was given 30 days to take an appeal from this decision, which was issued on May 25.  An appeal would not delay A.F.’s contact with the children, since the parties had stipulated an agreed-upon arrangement, so the only issue on appeal would be whether A.F. will be accorded all parental rights through the Orders of Filiation.

New York Lesbian Co-Parent Custody Claim Precluded under 12-Year-Old Decision

Posted on: October 8th, 2013 by Art Leonard No Comments

The evil that courts do lives on…  On October 4, 2013, the New York Law Journal published Rockland County Family Court Referee Dean Richardson-Mendelson’s opinion in Matter of A.F. v. K.H., V-00918-13, rejecting all attempts by a lesbian co-parent to obtain judicial relief against her former partner’s action of excluding her from contact with the children they had been raising together.  The principal barrier to her case is the N.Y. Court of Appeal’s old decision, Alison D. v. Virginia M., 77 N.Y.2d 651 (1991), which held in similar circumstances that the co-parent was, despite her relationship parental relationship with a child since the child’s birth, a “legal stranger” who did not have standing under New York law to obtain a declaration of her parental rights, custody or visitation, and that the circumstances that the women had agreed to raise a child together did not amount to “special circumstances” required under New York law to enable a legally-unrelated third party to seek custody of a child.

In A.F. v. K.H., the parents had registered as domestic partners, but the court mentions this only in passing and does not specify the jurisdiction.  A.F. and K.H. were living together as a couple when they decided to have children, using anonymous donor insemination for K.H. to conceive two children.  They lived together raising the children until they separated in July 2011, but continued to live on different floors in the same house, facilitating continued contact between A.F. and the children, who lived with K.H.  In February 2012 K.H. moved out with the children to her mother’s house in New Jersey, but then relocated back to another town in New York State in August 2012.  A.F. continued to have visitation two days a week and alternate weekends, until a promotion at her job made weekday visitation impossible.

A.F. contributed to the support of the children financially.  In May 2012, K.H. had filed a petition in Rockland Family Court seeking formal child support from A.G.  In support of this claim, her petition was full of factual allegations seeking to persuade the court that A.F. was a parent of the children who should be held to this responsibility.  But in August, she withdrew the petition, and the Support Magistrate marked it as withdrawn.

Visitation by A.F. and financial support for the children continued until an “altercation during a visitation exchange” in April 2013, after which K.H. has not allowed further visitation, resulting in A.F. filing this petition.

Referee Richardson-Mendelson found that the Alison D. decision, never overruled or modified by the Court of Appeals and subsequently followed by all four departments of the Appellate Division, had to control this case in terms of A.F.’s legal claim under the Domestic Relations Law.  One who would be declared a “legal stranger” to the child in 1991 remains a legal stranger today, as far as that statute is concerned, because the legislature never heeded the court’s suggestion that it address the issue of non-traditional families.  Second-parent adoption is legal in New York, as is step-parent adoption, but these parties never took those steps and did not marry in 2011 when New York enacted marriage equality.

Any local domestic partnership registration would presumably not change this, since custody and visitation are matters of state law, which may explain why the court does not explicitly factor that into its analysis.

Failing on a legal claim under the custody statute, A.F. also advanced equitable arguments.  First, she contended that the court should use the doctrine of equitable estoppel to hold that K.H. could not legally deny A.F.’s parental status because she had, in fact, treated A.F. as a parent of the child for several years, fostering the relationship of A.F. with the children and allowing visitation to continue for almost two years after the women’s relationship had ended.  But the Court of Appeals had directly rejected such an argument in the Alison D. case, so the court found that A.F. was precluded from making it.

Finally, A.F. argued judicial estoppel, a doctrine that prevents a party from taking diametrically opposite positions in legal proceedings.  A.F. pointed out that K.H. had filed a support petition in which she alleged that A.F. was a parent of the children, but now was arguing that she was not a parent.  A.F. contended that K.H. should not be able to assert these opposite positions.  But the court rejected this argument as well, pointing out that K.H. had withdrawn her support position longer before A.F. filed the custody and visitation petition.  The court also pointed out that this doctrine normally applies when a party’s assertion of the first petition had resulted in a legal judgment in her favor, that judgment then providing the basis to block her from taking the opposite position in a later proceeding.  In this case, however, K.H. withdrew her petition before any finding on A.F.’s parental status had been made and before any support order had been issued.

Thus, it made no matter to the court that New York is now a marriage equality jurisdiction.  Marriage equality provides equal marital rights, but it does not change the legal position of unmarried partners toward each other or their children.  Unless the New York legislature changes the rules, the legal invisibility of unmarried same-sex couples raising children will continue.