Legal Question in Family Law in Washington

placement option for a child: WAC 388-25-0450

My cousin lost custody of her child due to allege abuse and I would like to ask for custody. My record is clean as I have never done anything wrong but my husband has a felony harrassment on his record. This happened in Nov of 2002. The felony Harrassment is because he was verbally threatening me. He did everything he was suppose to and is no longer on probation.

Will this stop us from getting custody of the kids?


Asked on 3/10/07, 12:01 am

1 Answer from Attorneys

Elizabeth Powell ELizabeth Powell PS Inc

Re: placement option for a child: WAC 388-25-0450

Could prevent a CPS placement. Maybe, maybe not.

You can contact the CPS caseworker or your cousin and ask them to do a homestudy to see if placement with you would be appropriate or not. CPS has a policy to place children with extended family if possible.

However, the caseworker may think that with abuse in the child's past that the potential for more abuse is not in the child's best interest, and decide to place the child elsewhere.

Unfortunately convictions related to DV are not elgible for vacation. Some felonies - if they are one time occurrences - are sometimes elgible to be removed from the person's record under certain circumstances. I always hate to have to break this to people, but if the felony involved DV, you can never get rid of it.

So yes, it well could stop you from having custody of your cousin's kids.

Might as well be really up front with the caseworker, and if he's in complete compliance and theres been no issues, maybe.

Or maybe not. Hope this helps - knowing it probably does not -

Elizabeth Powell

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Answered on 3/10/07, 1:49 am


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