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A woman who was the victim of a sex crime as a minor was allowed to seek a protective injunction when the man who committed the crimes was released from prison, even though the terms of the man’s probation forbade contact with the victim, according to a recent 4th District Court of Appeal ruling. Regardless of the prohibitions contained in the man’s probation, Florida law gave the victim the right to request the protective injunction and required the trial court to hold a hearing on her request.

In 2003, B. was sentenced to 15 years in prison and 10 years of probation for sexual battery on a person less than age 12. With B.’s release date this year drawing close, his victim, H., went to court to obtain an order of protection against him. The trial court dismissed both of H.’s protective injunction petitions without holding a hearing. The court reasoned that a protective injunction was unnecessary because of the terms of B.’s probation. If B. made contact with H., he would be in violation of his probation and would probably be returned to prison.
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In unfortunately too many cases, a child grows up “fatherless” because his or her father fails to assume his parental responsibilities or because the child’s mother does not know who the father is. But what about cases where multiple men have stepped up to claim fatherhood?

This was the issue presented to one Florida appeals court earlier this year when a married woman gave birth to a child conceived as a result of her extramarital affair. Even though everyone involved agreed that the wife’s extramarital partner was the child’s biological father, this ultimately did not matter. In cases where a child is born to a woman who is part of an intact marriage, biological paternity was “legally insignificant” to the determination of legal paternity, according to the 2d District Court of Appeal‘s ruling.
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There are many reasons a divorcing spouse might sign off on a marital settlement agreement when one or more terms are less favorable than what that spouse would receive if the agreement followed the Florida Statutes. Whatever the reasons, a person in such a situation should be extremely careful when signing such an agreement because, as long as the language in the document is clear, courts will follow the agreement’s terms, as one recent 2d District Court of Appeal case demonstrates.

The case arose from the divorce of a Florida couple. After mediation, the couple came to terms on a marital settlement agreement. In that document, the husband agreed to pay the wife $4,500 per month in alimony. The alimony paragraph stated that the amount was non-modifiable and payable for the life of the wife.
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Child custody court cases involve many elements. One vital aspect is determining what is in the best interest of the child, an issue that many parents might feel capable addressing on their own. However, family law cases are still civil litigation matters, in many cases complete with multiple procedural layers. In one recent case, a trial court’s decision to grant a grandmother’s custody-related motion survived because, according to the 5th District Court of Appeal, the motion complied with the rules of procedure, so the trial court was within proper bounds to hear it and rule on it.

The case involved the custody of a son born to a Florida woman. In 1999, she granted legal temporary custody of the infant boy to the child’s grandmother. More than a decade later, in 2010, the mother was drug-free, remarried, and caring for her younger children with her husband. The mother asked the court to grant her substantial visitation with the child. The grandmother asked that the court require supervision for the visits, and the court agreed.
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For many students who go from high school directly to full-time college attendance, continued financial dependence on their parents is an economic reality. Realizing this, many divorcing parents address what happens to child support in the event that a child goes to college. Understanding exactly what your marital settlement agreement says on this issue is extremely important, since even seemingly minor variations in the agreement’s language can yield substantially different results. In one recent 4th District Court of Appeal case, the court terminated a father’s child support for a child who lived on campus at the University of Florida because the couple’s agreement required that the child was “living at home” with the mother, not just maintaining a permanent residence at the mother’s home and residing there during school breaks.

In 2004, couple in this case finalized their divorce. The spouses had reached a marital settlement agreement, which addressed child support. The father agreed to continue paying support on any child until that child’s 21st birthday if the child was attending college and living at home with the mother.
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Alimony can serve as an important lifeline, especially for divorcing spouses who subsist on fixed incomes. A recent 5th District Court of Appeal ruling highlights the basic concept of alimony law in Florida, saying that alimony must be large enough to allow the recipient spouse to meet her living expenses without having to spend her assets just to pay her monthly bills. In the 5th DCA’s recent decision, it sent a divorce case back to the trial court after deciding that the alimony imposed on the husband would not be enough to meet the wife’s monthly expenses.

The divorce in question regarded the 12-year marriage of a Florida couple. The couple achieved a partial settlement agreement of their financial affairs through mediation. The agreement called for the husband to refinance the marital residence and give the wife $4,000 from the proceeds of that transaction.

On the matter of alimony, the couple could not agree. The wife put forth evidence to the trial court that she was disabled and unable to work, and that she received $1,189 per month in disability payments as her sole source of income. She also testified that, in order to secure a home comparable to the marital residence, she would have to pay approximately $850 per month. The trial judge ultimately awarded the wife bridge-the-gap alimony of $300 a month for two years. The judge, in arriving at these numbers, expressly factored in the $4,000 the wife would receive from the refinance transaction.
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A recent 4th District Court of Appeal ruling clarified the proper factors for determining if a parent has sufficiently abandoned his child to allow the courts to terminate his parental rights and gave a pair of grandparents’ effort to adopt their grandchild new life. The appeals court’s ruling explained that, in order to terminate a parent’s legal rights to his child, the law requires proof that the parent showed an intent to reject his parental obligations, but it does not necessarily require evidence that the parent willfully disregarded the child’s safety.

S. fathered a child in 2002. In 2010, the child’s mother died. The mother’s parents then went to court seeking to adopt the child. As part of that process, they also asked the court to terminate the father’s parental rights. As part of their termination request, the grandparents argued that the father had abandoned the child, both financially and emotionally.

The trial court held a hearing. At the hearing’s conclusion, the judge ruled that the grandparents had proven that the father indeed had financially and emotionally abandoned his child. Nevertheless, the judge refused to terminate the father’s rights and denied the grandparents’ adoption petition. So, what went wrong? According to the trial court, the law also required the grandparents to prove that the father “willfully disregarded” the child’s safety, and they did not offer evidence on this point.
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A wife successfully managed to obtain a freeze of $3 million of her husband’s assets while posting an injunction bond of only $100. The 3d District Court of Appeal upheld this low bond because Florida’s courts were in the position only of enforcing an order in an underlying divorce case situated in Argentina, which meant that the Florida courts should defer to the Argentinian rule, which disfavors imposing bonds on the economically weaker spouse in a divorce.

A woman filed for divorce from her husband in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2011. Both were Argentinian citizens and residents, but the wife claimed that the husband held some money in bank accounts in Miami. The court in Argentina issued an order freezing half the funds in those accounts and seeking the aid of the American courts in enforcing that order.

The wife then went to the Circuit Court in Miami and succeeded in obtaining a temporary injunction to freeze the accounts. The court required the wife to pay a bond as part of the injunction process, but it set that amount at only $100. The husband asked the court to increase the amount of the bond, claiming that the injunction froze roughly $3 million in assets and that $100 was too small an amount. The court held a hearing but declined to increase the bond. The Circuit Court concluded that its role was nothing more than one of enforcement of the Argentinian order under the principal of comity, which means the recognition of legal rulings from an outside state or country.
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Psychological and physical evaluations can be important tools for courts as they analyze a parent’s fitness. The law, however, also maintains several hurdles on the permissibility of such examinations because of their invasive nature. The case before a court must implicate the parent’s mental or physical condition, and the parent must be on notice of the potential of an evaluation before the court may order such a step. In a recent case from southwest Florida, a mother’s appeal allowed her to escape such an evaluation when the 2nd District Court of Appeal ruled that her case did not meet either of the required criteria.

As part of one couple’s divorce, the court awarded primary residential custody to the mother and issued a time-sharing order. At a hearing in late October 2013, the court discovered that the father had not seen his daughter in more than four months. The father expressed his desire to see his child, but he also stated that he did not want to force his daughter to visit him.

The trial court assumed that if the mother was supportive of maintaining the child’s relationship with her father, the visits would be occurring in accordance with the time-sharing order. As a result, the court ordered the mother to undergo a psychological evaluation, but it made no findings of fact as part of the order. The mother appealed.
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An ex-husband’s attempt to force his ex-wife to share the cremated ashes of their son failed to succeed in either a Palm Beach County trial court or the 4th District Court of Appeal. The recent decisions make clear that the remains of the couple’s son did not legally constitute property and were not subject to the rules of property division.

The 2007 divorce of this Florida couple was a relationship marked by contentiousness, litigation, and tragedy. They battled over items as small as home videos and a baseball card collection. Then, in 2010, disaster struck when Wellington polo magnate John Goodman, while allegedly driving drunk, killed the Wilsons’ 23-year-old son by crashing his Bentley into the son’s car.

The couple launched a civil suit against Goodman, who eventually settled with the family for $46 million. The settlement brought an end to the husband’s alimony obligation to his ex-wife, but not to their legal battles. The couple could not agree regarding the burial of their son. The wife wanted to bury her son in Palm Beach County, where the son lived and died, while the husband desired to bury the son in Georgia, next to the graves of his parents. The husband argued before a Palm Beach County trial court that the son’s cremated ashes, which remain housed in a Royal Palm Beach funeral home, were property and should be subject to division, meaning splitting them in half and dividing between each of the parents.
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