The Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday in a high-profile child custody dispute that a parent cannot challenge the voluntary termination of parental rights on grounds that the court wrongly believed that the child was living in Texas. Such a jurisdictional challenge, the court decided, is not permissible under current Texas law.
The custody dispute was closely watched for its potential implications to allow challenges to other final custody rulings. It also attracted attention for the lineup of high-powered legal talent involved in the appeal. The mother, Dallas lawyer Gita Srivastava, was represented by a former Supreme Court chief justice, Wallace Jefferson, and two former justices, Deborah Hankinson and Harriet O’Neill. A top appellate lawyer, Chad Baruch of Dallas, represented the father, Andrew Greenhut of Massachusetts.
The appeal centered around Greenhut’s suit to overturn his 2015 voluntary agreement to relinquish parental rights to his infant daughter, identified in court records as D.S. He argued that the Texas divorce court lacked jurisdiction to order the termination because the baby’s home was in Massachusetts.
Srivastava said the termination agreement was not subject to a jurisdictional attack because Texas law requires a litigant challenging a voluntary termination to demonstrate fraud, coercion or duress.
In siding with Srivastava, a unanimous court said the Texas Legislature made a clear policy decision in 1999 when it adopted the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act (UCCJEA) that jurisdictional defects are not one of the enumerated grounds for challenging an order effectuating a voluntary termination of parental rights.
“The Legislature has the authority, within constitutional limits, to restrict post-judgment challenges via collateral attack, and we are not at liberty to judicially expand the statute’s plain language,” said Justice Eva Guzman.
The decision reverses a 2018 ruling by the Dallas-based 5th Court of Appeals, which held that the termination order was void because the Collin County court that heard the custody case did not have jurisdiction over D.S.
Greenhut and Srivastava were married in Texas about eight years before their daughter’s birth. They lived in Texas until shortly before D.S.’s birth when Greenhut moved to Boston for work. Srivastava remained in Texas where she worked for a major law firm but routinely visited Greenhut in Massachusetts. After D.S. was born, the family stayed in Massachusetts during Srivastava’s maternity leave. She then moved back to Texas to resume her job and D.S. split time between homes in both states.
Srivastava filed for divorce in Collin County when D.S. was eight months old. During the divorce proceedings, Srivastava alleged that D.S. was not under the continuing jurisdiction of another state court. Greenhut did not deny those allegations.
At oral arguments in March, Baruch said that Srivastava failed to tell the judge the full facts about where D.S. had been living since her birth. Jefferson focused his arguments on the need for finality in child custody cases, an argument supported in an amicus letter from the Texas attorney general.
“Like their parents, children have a compelling interest in finality and stability,” said Guzman. “The State has important interests as well, including protecting the welfare of the child and reducing the cost and burden of parental-termination proceedings.”
Justice Debra Lehrmann wrote a separate concurring opinion, joined by Justices John Devine and Brett Busby. She said she would add another reason to the statutory bar on Greenhut’s collateral attack on his affidavit of relinquishment.
“I would hold that the UCCJEA does not define a court’s subject matter jurisdiction and that a court’s rendition of judgment in violation of the statutory requirements, while erroneous, is not void and thus is not subject to collateral attack,” said Lehrmann.
Read the court’s opinion in In The Interest of D.S., A Child here.