Nevada family-law case summaries

This case involves a father asking a Nevada court to permanently end the mother's legal relationship with their young son. The father, Logan, and the mother, Shianna, dated from 2017 to 2019 and had a son, R.A.S., in 2018. After they broke up, Shianna - who was struggling with substance abuse - left R.A.S. in Logan's care so she could enter a 30-day rehabilitation program. When she finished the program in early 2020, she tried to find her son. According to her testimony, Logan had moved to a new home, changed his phone number, and blocked her on the social media account he shared with his now-wife. Logan's stepmother told her she did not have updated contact information. Shianna later relapsed, was placed on probation, absconded, and spent several months in jail in 2022. By the time she was released, she had not seen her son since December 2019. After her release, Shianna moved in with her sister, worked as a nanny, had another child whom she has cared for full time, and later started work as a dental assistant. In June 2023, Logan filed a petition to terminate her parental rights. After a hearing, the district court terminated her rights on four grounds and Shianna appealed. The Nevada Supreme Court reversed. The Court used the opinion to draw an important distinction between two kinds of termination cases. Most termination cases are filed by the state because a child is in danger; in those cases, parents are typically offered services and case plans, and termination is treated as a last resort. Nevada's statutes, however, also allow private individuals - like another parent - to file termination petitions, and the statutes do not distinguish between the two kinds of cases. The Court emphasized that private termination cases involve different motivations and circumstances and instructed district courts to handle them "carefully and with a watchful eye for these distinctions." Applied to Shianna's case, the Court found that none of the four parental fault grounds was supported by substantial evidence. On abandonment, the Court acknowledged that Shianna had not seen her son since 2019, which created a legal presumption of abandonment, but found Shianna had rebutted that presumption: she tried to find Logan and R.A.S. in multiple ways, but Logan had moved, changed his phone, and blocked her online. The Court said it was "difficult to discern what more Shianna could have done." On neglect, the Court explained that neglect is judged by how the parent treats a child while the child is in the parent's care; because R.A.S. was in Logan's care and was being properly cared for, Shianna could not be deemed to have neglected him. On unfitness, the Court held that this concept is closely tied to neglect; for the same reason, the unfitness finding could not stand. On token efforts, the Court found that Shianna's inability to locate Logan and R.A.S. - because Logan had cut off contact - undermined the conclusion that she had made only minimal effort. Because at least one ground of parental fault must be proven, and none was, the Court reversed the termination order without reaching the best-interest analysis or the evidentiary issues.