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BATTERED BIRTHRIGHT
Evan Scott grandfathered into ‘embarrassing adoption statute,’ says Boca
consultant
Published Thursday, January 20, 2005 at 1:00 am
by By Sean Salai
Evan Scott could now be in the hands of his adoptive parents if he hadn’t
been grandfathered into an obsolete Florida law forbidding consideration of his
biological father’s pre-birth conduct, a Boca Raton consultant on the case
said this week.
Charlotte H. Danciu, a Boca adoption attorney who was a volunteer consultant on
the Jacksonville-area case that concluded last week, said biological mother
Amanda Hopkins was unable to testify to the father’s alleged domestic
misconduct because three-and-a-half year old Evan was born during the brief
period that “an embarrassing adoption statute” was in effect. The state
statute was revised in 2003.
“If Evan had been born before 2001 or after 2003, the case would have been
different,” Danciu told the Boca News. “Unfortunately, this judge’s
ruling was totally consistent under the previous bad law, so I don’t see any
hope of this family winning.”
Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said Tuesday he could not intervene in the case of Evan,
whose adoption by an Atlantic Beach couple was contested three years ago by his
biological father.
A circuit judge last week awarded custody of Evan back to his mother Hopkins,
who said she would rather keep the boy than turn him over to an ex-boyfriend.
The adoptive parents previously had custody.
“She exercised her right to keep Evan after she realized she would lose,”
said Danciu. “Because this baby was born during the time of this very bad
adoption statute, the lawyers weren’t able to raise any issues of this
father’s abusive behavior before Evan’s birth.”
The first case dealing with pre-birth abandonment in Florida was the Doe case
of 1984, said Danciu. She has personal experience with the issue, having worked
on the “Baby Emily” case back in the early 1990s, when the Florida Supreme
Court ruled definitively that judges could consider the pre-adoption conduct of
fathers.
The current adoption statute favors foster parents, she said, offering some
emotional abandonment provisions for pre-birth conduct as well as a paternity
registry. The registry imposes a pre-birth responsibility on fathers to claim
paternity in the registry.
“The new law puts fathers on notice. If you have , the law says you know
something could happen,” Danciu said. “We have some good laws here in
Florida. They still need to be beefed up in the best interests of the child,
but Evan’s case should serve as a wakeup call to the legislature during this
session.”
Danciu said certain state legislators had expressed interest in sponsoring a
bill offering expanded standards of pre-birth conduct, such as failure to
provide emotional and financial support and spousal abuse.
“We’ve been gradually expanding the definition of abandonment,” Danciu
said. “It’s still a very high standard to terminate a father’s parental
rights.”
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A good friend will come and bail you out of jail . . . but, a true friend will
be sitting next to you saying, "Damn . . . that was fun!"
-----Unknown
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