Attorney Matthew R. Arnold answering the question: “What can I do to gain custody of my child in North Carolina?”
The South Carolina Supreme Court issued an important decision earlier this week when it decided Baby Veronica, the young adopted girl at the center of a major legal dispute, should be returned to her adoptive parents, the Capobiancos, in Charleston, SC. This meant that the girl will be removed from her biological father, Dusten Brown, who successfully sued before the very same South Carolina Supreme Court to take custody of the girl last year.
The decision, 3-2, ruled that the girl should immediately be returned to the adoptive parents’ custody and that the lower court should immediately move to finalize the couple’s adoption. The couple will see their daughter for the first time in 18 months since Brown successfully sued to reassert his parental rights, claiming that the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) prevented him from signing away his parental rights.
The case ended up making its way to the U.S. Supreme Court which ruled last month in a 5-4 decision that ICWA was never designed for cases like this where the Indian parent (Brown is 2 percent Cherokee) voluntarily chose to terminate his or her own parental rights. Instead, ICWA was meant to prevent the forcible breakup of Indian homes. The Supreme Court remanded the case to South Carolina for reconsideration and to determine which home would be in the best interest of the child.