Nevada family-law case summaries

Cierah Johnson and William Bennett divorced in March 2022 and initially shared joint custody of their two daughters on a week-on/week-off schedule. After Johnson's father died, she moved to Colorado, and the parties signed a court-approved stipulation in May 2022 giving Bennett "primary physical custody" of the girls in Nevada, with a note that the parties would "reevaluate the details" in a year. Johnson moved back to Las Vegas in May 2023, and the parents informally resumed week-on/week-off parenting, but Johnson never filed paperwork to change the custody order on the books. Bennett, an Air Force helicopter mechanic, was then ordered to transfer to a base in Georgia. He filed a petition asking the court for permission to take the children with him. Johnson opposed the move, argued that the parties were really exercising joint custody in practice, and filed her own countermotion asking the court to give her primary physical custody. After a three-day hearing, the district court granted Bennett's relocation request. The Court of Appeals identified two main problems with how the lower court got there. First, the lower court decided Johnson's countermotion for primary custody before deciding Bennett's relocation petition. Because Johnson's countermotion was based entirely on the fact that Bennett wanted to move, deciding it first effectively put the burden on Johnson to stop the move - the opposite of what Nevada's relocation statute requires. Second, the lower court used language suggesting Johnson had to do more than show what was "more likely than not" best for the children - it said she had to "significantly tip the scales" and show the children would be "far better off" with her - while at the same time saying Bennett only had to "equal or slightly exceed" what was available for the children in Nevada. That flipped and watered down the legal standards. On the question Johnson pressed hardest - whether the trial judge should have looked past the written custody order and assessed the parents' actual day-to-day arrangement (the "true nature" of custody under the older Rivero case) - the Court of Appeals sided with Bennett. The court explained that Nevada's relocation statutes were rewritten in 2015, after Rivero. Those statutes (NRS 125C.006 and NRS 125C.0065) now key the procedure to whatever custodial arrangement "has been established pursuant to an order, judgment or decree of a court." Because the 2022 stipulation clearly named Bennett as primary physical custodian and Johnson never moved to modify it, the trial court was right to treat Bennett as the primary custodian for purposes of his relocation petition. The Court of Appeals reversed the relocation order and sent the case back so the district court can reconsider Bennett's petition under the correct burden of proof - preponderance of the evidence - and decide his relocation petition before addressing any contingent countermotion by Johnson.

This case concerns two parents fighting over custody of their two young children after a divorce. Jasper and Carlos married in 2013 and divorced in 2017. They had two children, born in 2014 and 2016. Shortly after the divorce, both parents agreed in a court filing that Jasper would have sole legal and physical custody. In 2019, they again agreed that Jasper and Jasper's new husband could move with the children to Hampton, Virginia. In January 2021, Carlos asked the court to change the custody arrangement. His concerns focused on the children's gender fluidity and on Jasper's decision to support the use of certain strong psychiatric medications prescribed to one child. The court issued a temporary order in May 2021 giving Carlos joint legal custody, meaning both parents would share decision-making. Jasper's own attorney wrote that order, and Jasper did not object to it or ask the court to pause it. Two later disputes became important. First, the parents disagreed about whether to vaccinate the children against COVID-19; Jasper wanted to, Carlos did not. Second, an earlier 2019 order gave Carlos time with the children for Christmas 2021. Jasper asked the court either for permission to vaccinate the children or to postpone the Christmas visit. The court denied that request in early January 2022. By then, Jasper had already kept the children from Carlos over Christmas, in violation of the 2019 order. Then, right after the court's denial, Jasper had the children vaccinated and boosted anyway, against Carlos's wishes and against the court's temporary order. In May 2022, after a full-day hearing with testimony from both parents, Carlos's wife, and a clinical psychologist the parents had jointly hired, the court issued a 39-page order. It gave Carlos primary physical custody while keeping joint legal custody shared. The court did not agree that the children's gender fluidity was a "substantial change of circumstance." Instead, it found that Jasper's pattern of violating court orders and withholding Christmas visitation was the change of circumstances that justified revisiting custody. The court then went through each factor the law requires for deciding a child's best interest and concluded that primary physical custody with Carlos served the children's best interest. Because this required the children to move from Virginia back to Nevada, the court also applied the relocation rules and found relocation was warranted. On appeal, Jasper raised four arguments. The appeals court rejected all of them. It held that Jasper had waived the challenge to the temporary order by not objecting to it below, and that Jasper had treated that order as valid anyway. It held that the orders Jasper violated were not void or unenforceable. It held that the district court did not change custody merely to punish Jasper, because the court properly analyzed the required best-interest factors and found several that favored Carlos for reasons unrelated to the order violations. And it held that Jasper had not shown the court was biased against Jasper's transgender status, noting that the statements Jasper pointed to were made by Carlos, not the judge, and that a judge's rulings alone almost never prove bias. The court affirmed the custody modification. The court also declined Carlos's request to sanction Jasper, finding the appeal as a whole was not frivolous.