“In what’s being billed as a benchmark Kansas legal victory, a non-biological lesbian mother has been granted the same parental rights as the biological mother of two children.”
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/25/kansas-supreme-court-marci-frazier-lesbian-custody-_n_2760179.html
An Army dad whose wife left him and took their daughter to Scotland gained new hope when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the American courts can assert themselves in international custody battles.
In a 9-0 vote that overturned an appeals court decision denying Sgt. Jeffrey Chafin’s bid to get daughter Eris back, the high court rejected the idea that Chafin’s appeal was “moot” because the six-year-old girl had been in Scotland for more than a year. The justices sent the case back to the Florida-based 11th Circuit court, telling the judges there to rule on the merits.
“Such return does not render this case moot; there is a live dispute between the parties over where their child will be raised, and there is a possibility of effectual relief for the prevailing parent,” Chief Justice John Roberts said in the written ruling. “The courts below therefore continue to have jurisdiction to adjudicate the merits of the parties’ respective claims.”
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/02/19/supreme-court-gives-soldier-fighting-chance-in-child-custody-battle/#ixzz2LNu5GHoL
Miami Beach police detective Traci Sierra has seen a lot to anger and confound her in the 13 years she has worked in the violent crimes and domestic violence unit. Women who stay with husbands or boyfriends through years of beatings and abuse. Women who call police for help and then attack the officer arresting the man who was hurting them. Women afraid to stay, but even more afraid to leave. Women killed because they believe the man hurting them will stop on his own.
But Sierra takes heart from her occasional successes, like the young woman with a 2-year-old son who finally left her boyfriend after he beat her head against the floor so hard he split her forehead open. Sierra sat with her for two hours before the girl broke down crying, saying “I have to do something.’ ”
“You have to come to a breaking point,” Sierra says. “You have to say enough is enough. If no one takes a stand it continues. Until they address the situation and take control of their lives nothing’s going to change.”
On Thursday, Sierra and hundreds of other women in Miami-Dade will take a symbolic stand at the New World Center and Florida International University campus to say enough is enough. They are doing so as part of a global campaign called One Billion Rising, which aims to get a billion people — the number of women the United Nations estimates will be raped or assaulted in their lifetime — to take action with flash mobs, protests and dances.
“The New Hampshire House Criminal Justice Committee will hear two bills on Tuesday that would prevent a law enforcement officer from arresting a domestic abuser unless the officer witnesses the abuse occurring, or a victim files a formal criminal complaint with the court.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/04/new-hampshire-domestic-violence_n_2618152.html
Police in central Florida say a man bit off his girlfriend’s left thumb during a fight while he was driving her to work at Taco Bell.
Florida Today reports that hospital officials called police after the woman arrived for treatment Wednesday.
Palm Bay police spokeswoman Yvonne Martinez says 35-year-old Ricardo Marquis Davis confessed to biting off the thumb and spitting it onto the floorboard. He told police she had pushed his head while they were in the car.
Martinez says doctors were not able to reattach the woman’s thumb. She says police victim advocates are working to help her.
Davis is being held in the Brevard County Jail on aggravated battery charges.
The goings-on in front of six young kids at 647 NW Third Ct. in Hallandale Beach — the dope smoking and drinking, the yelling, cursing and threats — was so disturbing to an observer that she called the state’s child abuse hotline.
“It is just terrible,’’ the woman told the hotline operator just after the New Year. “Horrible.’’
Four days later, the 21-year-old mother of some of those children, Brittney Sierra, would be arrested for child neglect, which could be the least of her problems.
Investigators dug up the remains of an infant in a nearby yard on Friday. They might be Sierra’s son, Dontrell Melvin. If they are, Sierra, 21, could be charged with murder along with the boy’s father, Calvin Melvin, 27.
The scene at the house Sierra and her children shared with her mother, Renee Menendez and her children, shouldn’t have been a surprise to child-welfare workers, considering how many times they’d been there.
Department records indicate 30 contacts with Menendez, a KFC manager in her 40s who was raising four children ranging in age from 8 to 11 — Sierra’s half siblings.
Like her daughter Sierra, Menendez has now lost all of her children. Department of Children and Family workers moved them to a state home over the weekend.
In the wake of last week’s deadly school shooting in Connecticut, Miami-Dade police have arrested a 16-year-old student at Miami Lakes Educational Center who threatened on Twitter to “shoot up this school this Friday.”
Austin Lee Bowlin was charged with making a threat to injure others after he sent a series of tweets, via cellphone, after his principal made a safety announcement on the school’s loudspeaker Monday morning.
On Friday, a 20-year-old named Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 students and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn, before killing himself. The carnage has caused national outrage and prompted school districts around the country to review safety plans.
The first indication of trouble came in the form of Rilya Wilson’s case file: It seemed unusually thin.
State child welfare worker Dora Betancourt, who took over the 5-year-old foster child case in April 2002, examined the paperwork and noticed that no one had checked on Rilya in more than a year.
After a series of phone messages to Rilya’s foster mother, Betancourt came face-to-face with Geralyn Graham in the driveway of her Kendall home.
“Where’s Rilya?” Betancourt asked.
“Oh, I thought you were bringing her back,” Graham said, according to Betancourt, who testified Wednesday during Graham’s murder trial in Rilya’s disappearance.
Betancourt told jurors Wednesday that Graham’s story unfolded in a bizarre and confusing fashion. She said an unnamed Department of Children and Families worker whisked the 5-year-old away for some sort of mental health evaluation more than a year before
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/12/05/3127856/employee-who-discovered-rilya.html
“Then-CIA Director David Petraeus and Gen. John Allen, commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, intervened in a Washington, D.C., custody battle in September, writing letters on behalf of a woman who was found by a judge to have ‘severe personal deficits in the areas of honesty and integrity.'”
Read More at:
http://openchannel.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/11/13/15147228-as-fbi-investigated-petraeus-he-and-allen-intervened-in-nasty-child-custody-battle?lite