Nevada family-law case summaries

Cheyenne Soldo-Allesio and Kevin Alan Ferguson were never married but share a young child, E.F. After their final separation in February 2022, Soldo-Allesio obtained a temporary protective order (TPO) - a short-term court order intended to protect a person from alleged abuse - against Ferguson based on allegations of domestic violence and moved with E.F. to Florida. Ferguson then filed for primary physical custody in Nevada. Soldo-Allesio responded that Ferguson had a long history of domestic violence, attaching exhibits including the TPO and its extension, police reports, and photos of injuries. At trial, the district court excluded all of Soldo-Allesio's exhibits, mainly because she disclosed her trial exhibit list only three days before trial. Soldo-Allesio still testified about several incidents of alleged abuse. The court ultimately found there was no "clear and convincing evidence" of domestic violence and largely awarded the custody outcome Ferguson requested. Soldo-Allesio asked the court to reconsider, arguing it had used the wrong burden of proof on the domestic violence question and had wrongly thrown out all her exhibits. The district court denied that motion. The Court of Appeals reversed. It explained that Nevada law uses two different burdens of proof when domestic violence comes up in a custody case. To trigger the legal "rebuttable presumption" - a starting assumption a parent can try to overcome - that an abuser should not get custody, the abuse must be proven by "clear and convincing evidence" (a high standard). But when the court is simply weighing domestic violence as one of the statutory "best interest" factors used to choose a custody arrangement, the standard is the lower "preponderance of the evidence" (more likely than not). The district court used the higher standard for both purposes, which the Court of Appeals held was legal error. The Court of Appeals also held that the district court was wrong to suggest Soldo-Allesio needed to show Ferguson had been criminally convicted of domestic violence. A criminal conviction is not required to prove domestic violence in a civil custody case; a victim's testimony alone can be enough. Finally, the Court of Appeals concluded that excluding all of Soldo-Allesio's exhibits effectively was a discovery sanction, and the district court did not follow the rules (NRCP 16.205(g) and NRCP 37(c)) governing such sanctions - rules that require the court to consider whether the failure to disclose was justified or harmless and whether exclusion is an appropriate penalty. That mattered especially because some of the excluded exhibits had already been served on Ferguson earlier in the case, and because the Nevada Supreme Court has said courts must hear "all information regarding domestic violence" when deciding what is best for a child. The case was sent back to the district court to apply the right legal standards and reconsider the evidence.