After Houston mother Christine Stary was arrested in 2020 for beating her then 9-year-old son, her ex-husband Brady Ethridge wanted to prevent Stary from seeing or directly contacting their three children for at least two years.
During protective order hearings over the course of several months, Ethridge testified about the March 2020 incident and several previous instances in which he said Stary beat the children, forced them to sleep outside on the porch and abandoned one of their daughters on the side of the road during a drive back from Colorado.
The kids called the police for help at least six times, and Child Protective Services was contacted at least five times, according to court records.
After interviews with the children, a Harris County district court judge went a step further — she issued a lifetime protective order. Stary would not be allowed to see or directly contact her kids indefinitely.
Stary’s parental rights weren’t officially terminated — but she argues there’s no difference between that and a lifetime protective order. Now, she’s asking the Texas Supreme Court to rule the case needs to be reheard under a higher standard of proof.
“Termination of parental rights has been described as the death penalty of civil cases,” said attorney Eva Guzman, who argued for Stary on behalf of the Family Freedom Project Tuesday. “And that description fits because what's at stake is the fundamental liberty interest in the care, in the custody and the control of our children.”
Stary and Ethridge finalized their divorce in 2018 and agreed their children — all minors at the time — would spend half their time with each parent. But in March 2020, their son was taken to the hospital after Houston police were called to Stary’s home.
Court documents allege Stary grabbed the boy by the back of his head, beat his face on the hardwood floor and carpet, then continued to beat his bruised face as his nose began to bleed. At the hospital, Ethridge said he saw his son with scratches, bruises, blood, dried scabs and fingernail marks on his skin.
Stary was arrested and charged with injuring a child, a third-degree felony, and issued the permanent protective order by the end of the year. Stary wasn’t given notice that she’d be facing a lifetime restriction, her attorney said, and the court record didn’t indicate that either.
A trial court can issue a civil protective order that lasts longer than two years if a judge finds evidence that a parent has committed an act that would constitute a felony — regardless of whether the person has been charged or convicted.
The core issue for the high court's justices to decide is how much evidence is needed to separate a parent like Stary from her kids for life.
Issuing a civil protective order that lasts two years or longer requires a “preponderance of the evidence,” which means it’s been proved something is more likely to be true than not true. Terminating parental rights requires a higher burden of proof — trial courts must find the evidence “clear and convincing.”
Because the protective order is essentially a termination of Stary's parental rights, the trial court should have used a different legal process requiring the higher standard of evidence to prove the order was necessary, Stary's attorney Holly Draper told justices.
Draper also argues Stary wasn’t given the chance to properly defend herself against the domestic violence allegations in court and the evidence presented wasn’t enough proof that family violence had occurred and was likely to occur in the future.
"In a termination proceeding, that is a whole different ballgame from what happened here," Draper said. "Usually, those cases are going to take 12-to-18 months, you're going to do discovery, you're going to have an opportunity to put on a complete defense."
Stary also was not allowed to testify on allegations of her ex-husband's domestic violence.
The justices did acknowledge the seriousness of the permanent protective order against Stary. Justice Jimmy Blacklock said if given these options, he’d rather go to prison for two or three years than be prohibited from going near his own children.
“We have all of these elaborate doctrines of constitutional law that have been developed to protect people's liberty interests when they're at risk of being locked up for committing crimes,” Blacklock said. “And I wonder whether at the end of the day, what's been done to this woman — whether she deserved it or not — is actually far worse than that, and is a greater intrusion on her liberty than would be a prison sentence.”
Marshall Bowen was the court-appointed attorney defending the appeals court’s ruling — Ethridge did not file a response to his ex-wife’s appeal.
While he agreed with Blacklock's hypothetical, Bowen argued Stary still retains some parental rights, including access to her children’s medical and school records. She’s allowed two attempts to change the protective order. Therefore, he said it’s not an end-around to terminate Stary’s parental rights, as her lawyers allege.
“I think that the point of the protective order is to protect individuals, children, victims of domestic violence, a whole host of people from their abuser on a short-order time frame,” Bowen said.
Draper, Stary's attorney, also argued the law could be revised to require a judge apply the higher evidentiary standard — and a felony conviction — when considering a protective order longer than two years. But justices questioned whether that argument was protecting the rights of a parent over the rights of a child.
It’s a balancing act, Draper said, and there are other ways to protect children and other victims of domestic violence.
"A lifetime protective order is not necessary to protect children from imminent danger,” she said.
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