Long-delayed study earns father new parental rights trial

The Missouri Court of Appeals Western District ordered a rare new trial for a man who lost his parental rights even though a key report by a social services agency had yet to be completed.

“This is a close case, and we suggest that this material evidence may have produced a different result,” Judge Thomas H. Newton wrote for the court. 

The child at issue in the case, identified in the opinion as E.B.M., was born in January 2018 in Kansas City, where the mother had abruptly moved before his birth. Given the mother’s mental health issues and the death of a prior child from malnutrition and dehydration, the Jackson County Circuit Court’s juvenile division placed the child in protective custody. The mother’s parental rights later were terminated. 

The child’s father, B.M., tracked down his son two days after the birth and participated in the protective custody hearing. He later moved to Indiana and was ordered not to have contact with E.B.M. until his paternity was established. After the father missed taking the test while he was in the hospital, the juvenile court began building a case that the child had been abandoned. 

A subsequent test proved the father’s paternity, and he made several trips by bus to Kansas City to visit his son. As Newton wrote in the opinion, the trips “took a significant amount of time and expense — up to 20 hours for the round-trip and $300 — and he was sometimes forced to sleep in the bus station for lack of funds to pay for a hotel room.”

Meanwhile, both the circuit court and the father were waiting for a home study to be completed under the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children, or ICPC. Although the court ordered the study shortly after E.B.M.’s birth, the Missouri application took a year to be finalized, and it wasn’t assigned to an Indiana caseworker tasked with conducting the home study for another seven months. 

The study was completed in January 2020, one day after Judge J. Dale Youngs ordered the father’s parental rights to be terminated. The court’s finding of abandonment was based in part on the father’s lack of participation in the child’s early life, though Youngs, according to a transcript quoted in the opinion, noted that the father was “in a little bit of a Catch 22 here,” as he’d been forbidden to have contact with the child until his paternity was established. 

Despite repeated calls to check on its status, the father’s attorney didn’t learn that the Indiana home study had been completed until five days after the termination judgment was entered, and she wasn’t able to obtain a copy until the following month. The home study recommended that the child be placed with his father.

The appeals court, citing caselaw, said a motion for a new trial should be “entertained reluctantly, examined cautiously, and construed strictly.” Nonetheless, the court found the study constituted new evidence that wasn’t available at the time of the termination trial. 

Although the Indiana caseworker had given a preliminary assessment of the study during testimony, the actual study, Newton wrote, “contains more far-reaching information about Father’s intent not to abandon the Child and fitness to parent.”

Among other things, it confirmed that the father and his current girlfriend have no history of sex-offender, child-protection or serious criminal charges, and it presented no issues of any addictions or any disabling mental disabilities. It also, Newton wrote, demonstrated that “every cent in Father’s possession” outside of his living expenses had gone into visiting the child.

“Father lacks financial resources, but poverty has nothing to do with loving a child,” Newton wrote. Judges Mark D. Pfeiffer and Edward R. Ardini Jr. concurred.

Katie Rooney of Lathrop GPM in Kansas City, an attorney for the father, declined to comment on the decision, citing the ongoing nature of the case.

The case is In the Interest of: E.B.M.; Juvenile Officer v. B.M., WD83612.