TPR and Adoption Post-2016
March 22, 2017 § Leave a comment
Late note: The Governor yesterday signed into law SB 2342, which made some adjustments to the TPR statute. The most significant to most of us is probably that a GAL is discretionary with the court in voluntary-release cases.
Two recent cases handed down from our appellate courts address TPR and adoption decisions by chancery courts. You can read the cases at these links:
Doe v. Doe, COA, decided February 7, 2017
Hartley v. Watts, MSSC, decided March 2, 2017
These decisions are mostly of historical interest now, because, effective April 8, 2016, the Mississippi Legislature completely revamped the TPR and adoption statutes. Both of the above cases were decided by chancellors under the pre-2016 law.
I say the decisions are “mostly of historical interest” because some of the old grounds for TPR and adoption are still viable under the new law, so you might find something helpful in either or both of them in a post-2016 case.
Most every district I know is treating cases filed before the new statute but not yet final as coming under the new statute. That’s because it’s not worth a reversal to discover that it should have been done that way in the first place. In most cases, that means going back to the drawing board and starting from scratch, or pretty close to scratch.
If you have been living under a rock and haven’t even realized that the law has changed, I encourage you to study the new statutes carefully. Those forms you have stored in your computer that you last revised in 2007 simply won’t do the job anymore. Oh, and by the way, there are some tweaks to the statutes pending right now in the legislature that will change a few things in the 2016 law.
A couple of lawyers asked why I haven’t posted anything here about the new law. Well, for one thing, I want to see how it settles into our practice and how it gets implemented in most places. That process is ongoing. I think the best way to approach it is to tiptoe through it with your chancellor, finding out for yourself what will and will not fly in your district.
For another thing, it would take several posts to explicate the new law, and that’s without any case law to help interpret. You can read the statutes and draw your own conclusions as well as I can. I think it’s better to let the cases come down from on high with guidance for us here at ground level. In the meantime, we are all kind of feeling our way along.
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