Oregon Court of Appeals 09-15-10
From OCDLA Library of Defense
by: Abassos • September 14, 2010 • no comments
Read the full article for details about the following new cases:
- Dependency - Intent to Abandon - Location of Psychosexual Evaluation
No criminal cases from the Court of Appeals today. One dependency case though:
There are two primary issues. First, when father moved to Hawaii, did it establish the intent to abandon his child. Father argued:
"[t]he mere fact that mother and father moved to Hawaii in July 2009 fails to prove that father 'abandoned' [Z]. * * * [The] record reflects that mother and father were living together in Hawaii * * *, that mother contacted [Z] to inform him of their move, that mother continued to attempt to contact [Z], and that [Z] refused that contact. Even if father did not himself attempt to contact [Z] after the family moved, that circumstance existed only for the three months preceding the jurisdictional trial. Those circumstances fail to support the inference that father gave up his rights to [Z] with the intent of never reasserting them."
To which the court says:
We emphatically disagree. It is exactly father's move to another state and failure even to attempt to contact Z, immediately following a 10-year period of complete lack of contact, that directly supports the inference that father intended to relinquish his parental rights.
The second issue is whether the judge could order that father do a psychosexual evaluation and counseling in Oregon, rather than by phone from Hawaii. The court doesn't think much of the argument:
the court's order that father return to Oregon for therapy and treatment is also rationally related to the reasons why the court took jurisdiction. Z has suffered because he feels abandoned by his family, and the court took jurisdiction because it found father fled the state and abandoned Z. By requiring father to return to the state and to begin building a relationship with Z, the court was requiring father to be an active presence in Z's life in order to remedy one of the reasons why the court took jurisdiction in the first place.
