COA Expands Duties Of Minor’s Guardian When It Affirms Denial Of Guardian’s Request To Terminate Parental Rights
Opinion Published: February 11, 2025 (Boonstra, P.J., and M. J. Kelly and Maldonado, JJ.)
Docket No. 371349
Wayne County Circuit Court (Hon. Clyenthia LaToye Miller)
Counsel for Guardian: Lisa Schmidt of the Speaker Law Firm
Holding: Trial Court properly denied guardian’s request to terminate mother’s parental rights because, even though mother had not had substantial and regular contact with the child for more than 2 years and although mother had not supported the child for more than 2 years, the guardian’s actions prevented phone calls and visits.
Facts: The petitioner-guardian is a relative who had a permanent guardianship of a child (DPR). The child has lived with the petitioner near his entire life (since 2014). The respondent-mother lived there too briefly in 2015 through March 2016. Respondent-Mother had supervised parenting time starting in January 2021, but she frequently missed it, and unilaterally cancelled the supervised parenting time in May 2021. Respondent-Mother did not send any cards, letters, or other correspondence to DPR, and did not speak to DPR. Nor did Respondent provide financial support for DPR; instead, Petitioner-Guardian took care of all of the child’s needs. Petitioner-Guardian and Respondent-Mother also exchanged Facebook messages, which led the Referee to believe that Petitioner was not willing to facilitate contact between the child and Respondent-Mother, and the referee criticized the Petitioner for giving the nine-year-old child veto power of whether to speak to his mother. Therefore, the referee found, and the trial court agreed, that Respondent-Mother did not have the ability to visit, contact or communicate with the child.
Key Appellate Rulings:
A parent does not have the ability to visit or contact a child when the guardian prevents the parent from having communications.
The Court of Appeals was highly critical of the guardian’s responding negatively whenever Respondent-Mother asked to speak with DPR. While those messages do appear to shut down Respondent-Mother, it is very questionable whether they truly served to prevent Respondent-Mother from having contact, visit, or communication with the child. After all, Respondent-Mother could still send letters or postcards (and did not). Moreover, the dates of the messages highlighted in the Court of Appeals’ opinion are sporadic, and certainly would not qualify as “substantial and regular contact” even if Respondent-Mother had directly communicated with the child. October 3, 2021; May 5, 2022; August 13, 2022; October 24, 2022. Other text messages between the two adults in the first half of 2023 were about the possibility of getting together in person, but that did not happen either (Petitioner-Guardian responded to some but not all of those messages). By May 2023, when Respondent-Mother asked to see DPR, Petitioner-Guardian requested that Respondent-Mother (who had battled a drug addiction for many years, which was the reason for the guardianship) to do a drug screen before seeing DPR. Respondent-Mother agreed to do the testing and Petitioner-Guardian agreed to pay for the testing, but the two were not able to coordinate a time to make it happen.
The Court of Appeals noted that Respondent-Mother did not know her rights when she did not file a motion to enforce weekly visitation and the “lopsided power dynamic in which respondent believed she needed to answer to petitioner.” The Court of Appeals also noted that “early in these proceedings” (which was after the child had lived with Petitioner for many years), Petitioner decided she was not going to return DPR to respondent and repeatedly referred to DPR as “my son.” The Court noted that “Ruling in favor of petitioner in this matter would require us to implicitly hold that parents who place their children in guardianships have fewer rights than those who have their children removed by the state; we decline petitioner’s invitation to make such a ruling."
The Court of Appeals decision appears to impose duties on the guardian not included in that statute.
