Can a Significant Other's Criminal History Hurt a Custody Case

The answer to that question is maybe. It depends on several different factors. Your judge first and foremost. The kind of criminal history or conviction that your spouse or significant other has. Are we talking about marijuana use, drug issues, domestic violence or sexual abuse conviction, assault, assault with a deadly weapon.

Another factor is how long ago did they get the conviction or criminal history. For example if it has been 20 years since they have been convicted and they have not had another incident since, then a judge may not put a lot of weight on that IF it is NOT a conviction like murder, sexual assault, etc. If this is the case, then a judge probably will hold that against your significant other forever.

A few examples where a judges in my cases have held a significant other's criminal history or actions against them. About 10 years ago I had a client who was a pretty good Mom. Her and her ex-husband were very high conflict and were always going back to court. He was always wanting more parenting time and more custody rights than her. And the leverage that the ex-husband used was my client's then boyfriend. The mom's boyfriend liked to smoke marijuana & he had some misdemeanor convictions in Arizona. In Arizona there are the felonies which are the more serious criminal convictions and there are misdemeanors which are still crimes but less serious.

So the boyfriend had misdemeanor convictions for possessing marijuana. The judge in our case, found out about the boyfriend's conviction, and although the judge did not have a right to have the boyfriend not do drugs, my they did rule that my client's children could not be around the boyfriend. And this was a problem for my client because she was living with the boyfriend at the time.

So if she wanted to see her kids on a week off week on basis then she had to go to another house or send her boyfriend elsewhere. That really meant the end to their relationship at some point and they were both able to move on and be happy. But that is the situation where a judge did hold a person's criminal history against my client.

Another situation that I'm facing right now does not relate to criminal history or conviction, but relates to the alleged actions of my client's significant other. I will say that this client who is the father of the child is one of the best client's I have had and so is his significant other. There has been an allegation by the mother that my client's significant other has been coaching the child to say certain things about the mother. This came out in a child interview. The child during a mental health interview said that my client's significant other was coaching the child.

But then the child has revealed to my client that he lied because he felt pressured. But what ended up happening is that the child's statements came out through a trial and the judge was really upset and on the verge of excluding my client's fiance from the child's life forever. And the fiance has been in the child's life for many years.

So what I had to do was convince the judge that removing the fiance from the child's life would do more harm than good. And that maybe we should have a mental health professional look at the relationship between the child and the fiance and determine if it is a good one & needs to be nurtured and kept or not.