23 February 2016
 Categories: Law, Blog

Some ex-spouses and partners, in their inability to get along with each other, will use their children as pawns to get back at one another. The custodial spouse will sometimes interfere with and deny the visitation rights of the other parent to see and spend time with their children, and there has often been little the non-custodial spouse could do to prevent this from happening. However, a recent decision by the New York State Appellate Court in Brooklyn, New York, and new laws in Minnesota have given non-custodial parents a couple of ways to fight back against the custodial parent. The custodial parent can now risk losing receiving child support payments from the non-custodial parent and can even face criminal charges when they interfere with the ability of the non-custodial parent to spend time with their children.

New York Appellate Case

The core issue in the New York Appellate Case was that the mother, who was the custodial parent, was preventing the father from seeing his son. They would set up times to meet, and the mother and/or son wouldn't be there. The mother would make continuous disparaging remarks about the father to the son until the son no longer wished to see his father. This set the stage for a "Pattern of Alienation" complaint where the father requested that he be allowed to stop child support payments due to the interference of his ex-wife in his relationship with his son. The Appellate court granted his motion.

The important thing to remember is that the ex-wife consistently interfered with the relationship by not allowing the father to see his son over a couple of years and she was also shown to have an abnormal hatred toward the father by stating in court that she would do everything in her power to make sure the son and father never had a relationship as long as she could do something to prevent it. She didn't present any issues involving the father's behavior that would compromise the son's safety as a reason to keep them apart.

Minnesota Law

Minnesota passed a law late in 2015 making interfering with the relationship of a non-custodial parent with their children by the custodial parent a crime. Interfering with the relationship without due cause can lead to a two-year prison term and a $4,000 fine in normal cases, and a four-year prison term and an $8,000 dollar fine if there are extenuating circumstances such as trying to cover up the child being abused by the custodial parent.

If you are having custody and visitation issues that you can't resolve on your own, you should contact a family law attorney so they can go over the specific details of your case and decide on what course of action you should take to resolve visitation issues.