Nevada family-law case summaries

Charleslie Wayne Edwards and Benito Santoyo were married in Colorado and have one child together. According to the opinion, the family lived in Colorado for most of the marriage. On December 8, 2023, Edwards filed papers in a Nevada court asking for a divorce and for custody of the child. She claimed that she and the child had been living in Nevada for the previous six months, which she argued made Nevada the right place to handle the divorce and custody dispute. Santoyo asked the Nevada court to throw out the case, arguing it did not have the authority (called "jurisdiction") to hear it. He said he had already started divorce proceedings in Colorado on December 1, 2023. He also said Edwards and the child had only recently arrived in Nevada, and that Edwards had taken the child to Nevada without his knowledge or consent. Under Nevada law, a court cannot grant a divorce unless one of the spouses has lived in Nevada for at least six weeks before the case begins. And under the UCCJEA — a law that decides which state gets to handle child custody — Nevada courts generally can only rule on custody if Nevada is the child's "home state," meaning the child lived here with a parent for at least six months in a row before the case started. The court held an evidentiary hearing to figure out where Edwards and the child actually lived. Edwards testified that she and the child had lived in Nevada since April 2023, but she did not bring documents to back that up. Santoyo testified that Edwards lived with him in Colorado until November 2023. A friend of Edwards, Jesse Leszko, testified that Edwards and the child were at his Colorado home on December 1, 2023, and that Edwards had told him she lived in Colorado at that time. The district court concluded that the evidence showed Edwards had only lived in Nevada since roughly December 1, 2023 — about seven days before she filed her case. Because that did not satisfy the six-week residency requirement for divorce or the six-month "home state" requirement for custody, the court decided it lacked authority over the case and dismissed it, finding Colorado was the more appropriate place for the proceedings. On appeal, the Court of Appeals of the State of Nevada agreed with the district court. It explained that questions about how long someone lived somewhere are factual questions for the trial court to decide, and an appeals court will not re-weigh the evidence or second-guess who the trial judge found believable. Because the district court's finding was supported by adequate evidence, the appellate court affirmed the dismissal.

Amy Hendrickson and Eric Whitney share custody of their minor child. In August 2020, Whitney asked the family court to change the physical custody and child support arrangement set by a 2013 order, essentially seeking to formalize the shared custody the parents had been informally following since about 2017. In response, Hendrickson filed a single document that both opposed Whitney's request and asked for primary physical custody so she could relocate with the child. Because a local court rule (Washoe District Court Rule 10(3)(a)) requires that a motion, opposition, and reply each be filed as a separate document unless pleaded in the alternative, Hendrickson withdrew that combined countermotion, with the court's permission, and refiled her request for primary physical custody as its own separate motion. Less than a month later, she also filed a separate motion for permission to relocate with the child. Whitney filed oppositions to both new motions and, in each, asked the court to make Hendrickson pay his attorney fees, noting that he effectively had to respond to a request for primary custody twice and had to oppose three motions over just a few months. After a hearing, the district court found that Hendrickson did not clear even the first requirement a parent must meet to relocate — a "sensible, good faith reason for the move" — and denied her relocation request. The court decided Whitney was entitled to fees. In its written order, the court listed several general fee-and-cost authorities (such as NRS 18.010, NRS 18.020, and NRCP 11) in a boilerplate way, and made detailed findings about the amount of fees under the standards from two Nevada cases (Brunzell and Miller v. Wilfong), but it never clearly tied the fee award to a specific legal basis. On appeal, Hendrickson's only argument was that because the district court did not set out a proper legal basis for the fees, the award should be reversed. She did not dispute the amount of the fees or the reasonableness of the request. The Court of Appeals agreed with some of Hendrickson's concerns about the specific authorities the district court cited, but affirmed anyway. It explained that a separate statute, NRS 125C.250, gives family courts discretion to award reasonable attorney fees and costs in cases about legal custody, physical custody, or visitation of a child. Because a court can be affirmed when it reaches the right result even for the wrong reason, and because this was a drawn-out custody dispute, the Court of Appeals concluded the district court did not abuse its discretion in awarding fees.