We still have hope that one day we will be able to be re-united with you and be able to be in your life and get to know you. We pray everyday for your safety and well being. We hope that you are being loved as much as we would love you. The holidays come with family, love, and laughter, and we always struggle celebrating these without you. This past holiday, Thanksgiving, we felt thankful to have you a part of our family, we felt grateful knowing where you are at, and that you are in good hands. We felt thankful that one day we will get to be a part of your life and get to be a part of your family. Jackson, we love you so much! We will never stop fighting for you. With each of these Utah Supreme Court decisions ruling in the favor of father's who's rights were wrongfully terminated gives us hope that the justices will see the truth in your case as well. We are waiting for some things to settle with the lower district court before we can move forward to the Utah Supreme Court. Jack, we love you with all our hearts.
Love,
YOUR FIRST FAMILY
The Salt Lake Tribune
Florida man gets a shot at being a dad
Adoption • Utah’s high court says father needs to have a
chance to build a relationship with his child.
Leah Hogsten | Tribune file photo Florida resident Ramsey Shaud, left, appeared in Utah's Supreme Court, with his attorney Daniel Drage, in 2011 in his parental rights case.
In a 3-2 decision, the Utah Supreme Court has
found that Utah’s adoption law was “constitutionally defective” in depriving a
Florida father a “meaningful chance” to develop a relationship with his child
after a notice of paternity he filed was not recorded in a timely manner because
of the state’s then four-day workweek and a federal holiday.
The high court reversed a decision by a trial judge who
found that Ramsey Shaud had acted too late to stop the adoption of his daughter,
born in January 2010. The justices sent the case back to the lower court to
reconsider whether the Utah Office Vital Records and Statistics received Shaud’s
paternity notice before the child’s mother placed her for adoption.
Shaud alleges, the court noted, that he attempted to
protect his parental rights in a timely fashion but that the office “negligently
delayed” entry of his notice in the state’s paternity registry, which the trial
judge used as a basis of finding he had moved too late to have any say in his
daughter’s adoption.
“We conclude that the district court’s interpretation of
the [adoption act’s] strict compliance standard poses an unacceptable risk of
erroneous deprivation of unwed fathers’ rights,” the court said. It also said
that protecting the state’s compelling interest in timely adoption decisions did
not require that a paternity petition be considered filed only at the time it
was entered into the registry.
“Rather, we hold that Mr. Shaud’s notice must be
considered filed when Vital Records received it, because, at that point, Mr.
Shaud had done all that he could to strictly comply with the act,” the court
said.
The opinion was written by Justice Christine Durham, who
was joined by Justices Ronald Nehring and Jill Parrish. Chief Justice Matthew
Durrant and Justice Thomas Lee dissented.
The court heard oral arguments in the case in September
2011. It issued the decision Friday, but it was not posted on the court’s
website until Tuesday after The Salt Lake Tribune inquired about the ruling.
“I honestly never thought this day would come!” Shaud
said Tuesday. “All I can do is smile. ... [It has] restored my faith in the
judicial system out there, and I look forward to getting our case going in the
lower court.”
Daniel Drage, his attorney, praised the justices for
thoroughly considering the constitutional implications and due-process pitfalls
of Utah’s current adoption law. Drage said he and his client were looking
forward to getting back in court for a hearing to “establish that he has
perfected his rights as a father, that notice was timely received by the Bureau
of Vital Records and that he will have an opportunity to be a father to his
daughter.”
While the decision assures Shaud, 26, a shot at making
the argument that he acted in time to protect his parental rights, it does not
guarantee he’ll get to parent his child — a matter that will likely involve
numerous additional court hearings in which his fitness as a parent will be
weighed against those of the child’s adoptive parents and what is in the child’s
best interests.
How it began • Shaud learned in 2009 that 19-year-old
Shasta Tew, with whom he had a casual relationship, was pregnant. When Tew said
she didn’t want to raise the baby, Shaud, who was then 22, said he would take
responsibility and care for the child. After Tew began pursuing an adoption,
Shaud refused to sign off and moved quickly to protect his parental rights for
the coming baby, due in February 2010.
He signed with the Putative Father Registry in Florida,
where both live, so he would be notified of any adoption proceedings. Five
months later, Tew sent Shaud a note saying she planned to visit Arizona and Utah
for the holidays. He feared her real intent was to go to one of those states to
place her baby for adoption.
Shaud easily filed with Arizona’s registry but had
trouble finding information about what he needed to do in Utah to protect his
rights. At the time, Utah’s Department of Health did not provide a link to
putative-father forms online; it added a link in January 2012.
Shaud hired Drage, who filed the required paternity
petition in court Jan. 12, 2010, and the same day faxed a copy to the Office of
Vital Records and Statistics. At the time, the state followed a four-day work
schedule so it was closed that Friday, as well as the following Monday, which
was a federal holiday. The office did not file Shaud’s paternity notice until
Jan. 20, 2010.
By then, Tew had already given birth — Shaud’s daughter
was born prematurely Jan. 15, 2010. On the same day Shaud’s paternity paperwork
was officially filed, Tew relinquished her parental rights and the infant was
placed with adoptive parents through A Act of Love Adoptions in Orem.
Shaud tried to fight the placement in a lower court, but
a trial judge said he had acted too late to protect his parental rights under
Utah’s adoption law. Shaud appealed.
The high court’s ruling is the second decision in a
father’s favor this year. In January, it ruled a Colorado father was improperly
denied a say in his daughter’s adoption and also sent the case back to a lower
court for a rehearing.
In that decision, the court said Robert Manzanares did
not know and reasonably could not have known that a birth and adoption would
take place in Utah and that he needed to protect his rights here. Manzanares had
filed a paternity petition in Colorado and had been assured by his daughter’s
mother that she had no intention of placing the child for adoption, something
the woman also told a Colorado judge. Manzanares learned about a week after his
daughter’s birth Feb. 17, 2008, that she had been born in Utah and placed for
adoption.
After the Utah Supreme Court ruling, a Utah judge
dismissed Manzanares’ case so that it could proceed in Colorado. His parental
rights were affirmed and, under the guidance of a child psychologist, he has
slowly been introduced to and allowed to build a relationship with his daughter.
She was told in October that Manzanares is her daddy.
A matter of timing • In Shaud’s case, the Vital Records
office told A Act of Love that no paternity filing had been made; 45 minutes
later, it officially logged Shaud’s paperwork.
But a notice “cannot be considered filed only upon its
entry into Vital Records’ registry,” the high court said. “This definition of
‘filed’ creates unfair uncertainty as to the proper filing date and infringes
upon Mr. Shaud’s opportunity interest in protecting his relationship with his
daughter.”
The majority referred several times to the court’s
decision in the 2007 case, in which it held that the state’s adoption law had to
“avoid due process implications that arise when a father’s compliance is not
within his power.”
It also said that Shaud’s attorney did not need to
specifically use the “magic words” of “due process” in the lower court to raise
that constitutional argument. The court pointed out the attorney had made
numerous other references about the rights at stake. The fact that a copy of his
court filing was not included with the notice did not matter because Vital
Records accepted his filing and it was not the basis of the lower court’s
ruling, the majority also said.
Those two points were the basis of the dissent. Justice
Lee said the majority was “jumping the gun” and reading “far too much into the
arguments Shaud presented in the district court.” He found that Shaud had not
preserved a constitutional challenge but merely “questioned the fairness of the
statutory scheme on policy grounds.”
“When Shaud complained that he had done everything within
his control, he was not asserting the due process point that the court today
embraces in his opinion,” Lee wrote in the dissent. “He was merely seeking, in
other words, to protect his rights under the statute in light of his vague
concerns about fairness and broad epithets about the state’s carelessness.”
brooke@sltrib.com
Twitter: @Brooke4Trib
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