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The protracted court case involving the medical care of a 4-year-old Palm Beach County boy took another turn recently, when the child’s mother refused to appear in court as ordered, leading Circuit Judge Jeffrey Gillen to issue a warrant for her arrest, the Sun-Sentinel reported. The case centers around the decision to perform a circumcision on the boy, which the father supports and the mother opposes. Counsel for the mother has argued that she is acting to protect her child, but the Florida courts have consistently upheld the father’s right to make the decision regarding the circumcision, as the mother voluntary relinquished this decision-making right as part of parenting plan agreement signed by the mother in 2011.

D. N. and H. H. welcomed a baby boy on Oct. 31, 2010. The parents later signed an agreed parenting order that stated that the father would handle all matters related to completing the child’s circumcision, including scheduling the appointment, transporting the child and paying for the procedure. The mother agreed to sign all necessary forms to permit the procedure to take place.
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If you’re a parent paying child support, while you undoubtedly desire to provide for your children, avoiding overpaying is also important, since being forced to overpay may impair your ability to be involved in your children’s lives in other ways, as well as impeding your ability to meet other financial obligations. That’s why it is often very important to understand the situations and criteria under which Florida law lets you go to court to seek a reduction in your child support obligation. One circumstance that can derail an otherwise valid petition for reducing child support is having a willful arrearage, as one Manatee County father found out in a case decided by the 2d District Court of Appeal recently.

When a Florida couple divorced in 2009, the husband was ordered to pay child support. By the spring of 2012, the husband had fallen behind, amassing a total child support arrearage in excess of $11,700. The husband was held in contempt of court at that time. Nearly a year and a half later, the husband returned to court seeking to reduce his child support obligation. The wife countered by asking the court to increase the child support amount and offered evidence that the husband’s back-owed child support amount had swelled to more than $24,000.
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Sometimes, one of the most challenging aspects in a marital settlement arrangement, other than child custody, is deciding what to do with the marital home. In many cases, both spouses jointly own the property, but only one spouse still lives in the marital home and that spouse desires not to move. One way to deal with such a situation is to give the spouse desiring to stay an opportunity to buy out that spouse’s one-half ownership of the home. One example of this situation was a case recently decided by the 4th District Court of Appeal.

The case involved the 2013 divorce of a Broward County couple. The couple reached an agreement, which the trial court approved, regarding the marital home. That agreement called for putting the house up for sale, but it also gave the husband a right of first refusal, meaning that, once an offer was received on the home, the husband had the right to match the offer and purchase the property himself, as long as he paid the wife cash.
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A Florida trial court’s award of alimony to a wife was thrown out recently by the 2d District Court of Appeal for being too low. The appeals court concluded that the trial court’s outcome, if put into action, would leave too great a disparity between the ex-spouses and would force the wife into a lifestyle below that which she enjoyed during the couple’s marriage.

A couple decided to end their 28-year marriage in 2011. Although the wife had a master’s degree and had been the primary earner through much of the marriage, her job at the time of the divorce paid only $29,000 annually. The husband was making $280,000 per year by 2011.
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Following time-sharing schedules can sometimes be complicated, especially when timesharing involves a child who is old enough to have a desire to assert her own self-control over where she lives. Even when faced with a child who does not want to return to the home of your ex-spouse, it is important to note that failure to follow court-ordered dates for returning a child to Florida from outside the state (or country) can have damaging impacts on your custody rights. In case recently decided by the 5th District Court of Appeal, that court ruled that an emergency order granting custody to a mother was legal even though the trial court never determined that it was in the daughter’s best interest. The court was not required to address the daughter’s best interests because the father engaged in an “improper removal” by failing to bring the daughter back to Florida from the United Kingdom on the date the court had established a month earlier.
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The implementation of a parenting plan hopefully represents the culmination of a collaborative process to create an outcome in the best interests of the children involved. Sometimes, though, circumstances change, and those changes may trigger the need for a modification of the plan. When they do, the Florida Statutes have some specific requirements regarding what must be established in order to modify a custody arrangement, especially if that modification involves stripping one parent of all decision-making authority.

A recent example of this in the 5th District Court of Appeal was the custody dispute between two parents. The couple married in 1993, but after a decade and a half of marriage, the husband filed for divorce. The couple’s 2009 marital settlement agreement called for a fairly common custody arrangement, with the mother getting primary physical custody, the father getting visitation, and the parents agreeing to share “parental responsibility on all aspects of the children’s lives.” The agreement also called for the father to pay child support.
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In child support matters, there are certain issues that can be murky and complicated to ascertain, such as identifying when a change of circumstances has occurred that is significant enough to warrant a modification of a payor parent’s child support amount. While identifying the payor spouse’s income for purposes of calculating child support might seem like an easier task, this is not always the case, especially when the payor spouse’s income includes irregular but large bonuses. This was the case in a legal battle in the 4th District Court of Appeal between a political consultant and his ex-wife.

The couple divorced in 2009. Several years later, the mother returned to court to ask that it modify the child support order and raise the amount the father owed. The mother argued that the father made nearly $495,000 in 2012 and that this amount should serve as the basis for a calculation of the modified support amount. The trial court agreed with the mother and ordered the modification.
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A couple’s long-running legal battle over child support will run a while longer, as the 3d District Court of Appeal reversed a lower court ruling that would have closed the case. The appeals court instead sent the case back, ruling that the trial court should have heard additional evidence, and issued an award, regarding the interest that accrued on the father’s support arrearage from the time the court issued an order in April 2010 until the husband paid off the pre-interest balance in August 2012.

The issue of child support following the divorce of Nivia and Albert Lascaibar was a long-running dispute, making its way through the courts in South Florida for a period of two decades. By 2010, a magistrate calculated the father’s child support arrearages to be in excess of $82,800. The magistrate also stated that “interest has and shall continue to accrue on any outstanding arrearage.” After the father paid off that $82,800 sum, the trial court declared the case closed.
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For some, it is about the ethics of performing arguably medically unnecessary surgery on a child. For other, it is about how much “say so” each parent should have in making decisions on behalf of his or her child. For the Florida courts, however, the case surrounding a child’s circumcision boiled down to the existence of a valid parenting agreement and the absence of any changed circumstances that would warrant the courts stepping in to avert that agreement’s execution.

The Palm Beach County parents H.H. and D.N. gave birth to the boy in 2010. The parents never married. Shortly after the child turned one, the parents each signed an agreed parenting plan. Parenting plans are required in cases that involve timesharing, even if the parents are in agreement about the timesharing schedule.
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In one recent Florida divorce, a trial court’s failure to give the husband a meaningful opportunity to be heard in the case, as well as the court’s improper shifting of the burden of proof from the wife to the husband regarding whether Scotland law or Florida law should govern the divorce, forced the 5th District Court of Appeal to reverse the trial court and send the case back for a new trial.

Before the former couple married in Scotland, they executed a “Minute of Agreement,” which is the approximate equivalent of a prenuptial agreement. The couple’s agreement stated that, if they divorced, the court deciding the case should use Scottish law.
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