Nevada family-law case summaries

Jesusa and Wayne Conte married in 1986 and divorced in 2012. Their divorce decree required Wayne, a military veteran whose only income comes from a retirement pension, supplemental security income, and veterans' disability income, to pay Jesusa $1,000 per month in alimony for 15 years. According to the opinion, Wayne refused to voluntarily pay, so Jesusa repeatedly had to go to court to garnish his pension (garnishment means taking money directly from a source of income under a court order). Over the years, courts entered judgments confirming what Wayne owed, including a December 2014 judgment for $16,307.50 in unpaid alimony (which the parties agree was later paid off) and a February 2021 judgment for $45,680.68. In February 2023, with the help of a pro bono attorney, Wayne asked the district court to eliminate or reduce his alimony. Among other things, he argued that a Nevada statute, NRS 125.165, barred the court from counting his veterans' disability payments as income when figuring out alimony. He also asked for sanctions under NRCP 11 - a court rule allowing penalties for improper filings - based on statements Jesusa made in her written opposition to his motion. Without holding a hearing, the district court granted both requests in January 2024. It refused to count Wayne's $4,456.22 per month in veterans' disability benefits as income, concluded that Jesusa's net income exceeded Wayne's, terminated the alimony, and made the termination retroactive to August 2022. On its own, the court also went back through a decade of the case's history, decided that the December 2014 order had "overcharged" Wayne by $6,698, credited that amount against his arrears, and imposed $5,000 in sanctions against Jesusa and/or her counsel based on its own review of past filings - not on the four arguments Wayne had actually made in his sanctions motion. The Nevada Court of Appeals reversed. First, it held that NRS 125.165 only forbids courts from attaching, levying, or seizing veterans' disability benefits to satisfy alimony - it does not stop a court from considering those benefits when calculating how much alimony a veteran can afford to pay. Federal law does not forbid such consideration either. If the district court had counted the disability benefits, Wayne's net monthly income would have been over $300 higher than Jesusa's, rather than negative, so the error could have changed the outcome. Second, the appellate court held that the district court should not have gone back and recalculated arrears from the 2014 order on its own. Wayne never asked for that, Jesusa had no notice or chance to respond, and the 2014 judgment was final and could not be reopened under the doctrine of res judicata (claim preclusion) - the rule that a valid, final judgment ends the dispute it resolved. Third, the court vacated the $5,000 sanctions award because the district court never addressed the arguments Wayne actually raised in his NRCP 11 motion and instead sanctioned Jesusa based on its own investigation of her filings over many years, without giving her the required notice and opportunity to respond. Finally, given these circumstances, the Court of Appeals directed that the case be reassigned to a different judge on remand "to ensure fairness in the ongoing proceedings."

This is a family-law-related dispute in which one party, Jesus Arevalo, asked the Nevada Court of Appeals to step in and issue an extraordinary order against a lower court. He was pursuing two things at once. First, he wanted the appellate court to force the trial judge off his case; the trial court had already denied his request to disqualify (remove) that judge. Second, he wanted the appellate court to make the district court follow an earlier order the appellate court had issued on January 17, 2024, in a related case (Docket No. 86607-COA). To get relief, Arevalo used two special tools. A writ of mandamus is a court order that forces a lower court or official to do something the law requires them to do, or to correct a decision made in an arbitrary or unreasonable way. A writ of prohibition is the opposite kind of order - it stops a lower court from acting beyond the limits of its authority. Both are described by the court as "extraordinary remedies," meaning they are not routine and a court has discretion over whether to even consider such a request. The court explained that the person asking for this kind of relief carries the burden of showing it is warranted, and that it is available only when there is "no plain, speedy, and adequate remedy at law" - in other words, only when the ordinary court process cannot fix the problem. After reviewing the petition and the documents filed with it, the court concluded that Arevalo had not shown that its extraordinary intervention was warranted. It therefore denied the petition. The order is brief and does not analyze the underlying disqualification dispute or the earlier writ in detail; it rests on the conclusion that the demanding standard for extraordinary relief was not met.

Jeremy and Kelly Herrmann married in 2007 and had two children. In December 2021, Kelly filed for divorce in Nevada, seeking sole legal and primary physical custody. By then Kelly had already moved back to California, while Jeremy still lived in Nevada. In April 2022, the district court entered a default divorce decree that gave Kelly sole legal and primary physical custody and stated that it was in the children's best interests to relocate to California with Kelly. Over the next year, both parents moved out of Nevada. Jeremy filed a change of address in July 2022 indicating a move from Reno to Montana. Kelly filed a change of address in July 2023 indicating a move from California to Pennsylvania. Shortly after Kelly's move, in August 2023, Jeremy filed a motion asking the court to enforce the divorce decree and/or to hold Kelly in contempt, alleging she had relocated the children to Pennsylvania without first getting permission or his consent. At a February 2024 hearing, Jeremy testified he was then in Arizona but not residing there, describing himself as a "fulltime traveler," said he was homeless, and confirmed his address on file was in Montana. Kelly testified she was in Pennsylvania with the children. After the hearing, Kelly filed a custody-modification petition in Pennsylvania, Jeremy filed one in Nevada, and Kelly asked the Nevada court to give up (relinquish) jurisdiction because everyone had left Nevada and proceedings were underway in Pennsylvania. Jeremy asked the Nevada court to hold a conference with the Pennsylvania court to resolve which state should handle the case. The Nevada district court then ruled. On the contempt issue, it found that although Kelly had relocated without seeking the court's permission, Jeremy had not filed the sworn statement (a fact-specific affidavit or declaration) required to support a contempt motion, so the court lacked jurisdiction to find contempt. On the larger jurisdictional question, the court found that once the parents and children no longer lived in Nevada, Nevada lost its "exclusive, continuing jurisdiction" over the custody dispute. After an informal conference with the Pennsylvania court, the two courts agreed Pennsylvania would take jurisdiction, so the Nevada court relinquished the case and denied Jeremy's Nevada custody-modification motion as moot. The Court of Appeals affirmed. It explained that under the law governing which state handles interstate custody cases, Nevada's continuing authority ends when the child, the parents, and anyone acting as a parent no longer live in Nevada. Because nobody disputed that all of them had left Nevada — and had been gone for more than a year before Jeremy filed his August 2023 motion — Nevada had lost that continuing authority. The court noted that Jeremy's complaint about the original decree letting the children move to California could not be reviewed now because he never appealed that decree in time. The court also said Jeremy failed to explain how Kelly's allegedly improper move to Pennsylvania would give Nevada authority to keep handling the case, and he did not point to the relevant statute or any supporting authority. Finally, the court found nothing in the record supporting Jeremy's claim that the district court was corrupt.

Jeremy and Kelly Herrmann were married in 2007 and have two minor children. In April 2022, the district court entered a default divorce decree - a divorce judgment issued after Jeremy failed to participate in the proceedings. Later in 2022, Jeremy filed many motions asking the court to enforce the divorce decree or to hold Kelly in contempt, mostly over how property was divided and over property he said had been left out of the decree, including a Cummins engine and Kelly's pensions. At a November 2022 hearing, Kelly said Jeremy had a federal pension he had not disclosed before the divorce decree was entered, which Jeremy denied. In November 2022, the court resolved 31 of Jeremy's motions, ordering that several mistakenly omitted items be divided equally. The written order mentioned the Cummins engine but did not decide that issue. The court told both parties to file proof of their retirement accounts within 30 days, warning that any claims would be treated as given up if they did not. Jeremy did not file proof of his pension. In January 2023, the court entered an order awarding each party their own pension as separate property. Jeremy then filed a "motion to set aside default judgment," asking the court to undo the pension order, along with seven more motions about withheld, damaged, or omitted property, again including the Cummins engine. The court denied all but one of the motions, found Jeremy was filing piecemeal motions to harass Kelly, and ordered each party to keep any remaining community property in their possession except items specifically awarded to the other in the decree or a prior order. The court also, on its own, set a hearing to consider whether Jeremy should be declared a vexatious litigant. Jeremy appealed. The Court of Appeals ruled on three of Jeremy's challenges and declined to reach others. First, it upheld the denial of his request to undo the pension order, noting he had been given ample time to obtain his pension information but did not do so, did not ask for more time, and did not, on appeal, challenge that finding. Second, on the Cummins engine, the court explained that a party can ask a court to divide an asset mistakenly left out of a divorce decree within three years of discovering the mistake, but Jeremy did not point to evidence showing the engine was an omitted asset rather than part of a vehicle already awarded to Kelly. Third, the court rejected Jeremy's claim of judicial bias, finding he had not shown the bias came from outside the case or reflected the kind of deep-seated antagonism that would make fair judgment impossible. The court also dismissed the appeal to the extent Jeremy tried to appeal from the order merely setting a future vexatious litigant hearing, because no statute or court rule allows an appeal from such an order. Claims about child custody and other matters were not addressed because they related to earlier orders not timely appealed or were not raised below.