Even people who naturally seek out human drama find the twists and turns associated with family court cases. You may have kept your cool during your marriage and resolved as many conflicts with your spouse as you could; you and your spouse might have even kept your commitment to having an amicable divorce. Conversely, you may have had a hideously ugly divorce, where your ex escalated the conflict to where you and your ex could only communicate through your lawyers, and the judge had to intervene in multiple disputes, even before finalizing your divorce. In either case, once you are co-parenting with a former spouse, there will be times when your ex-spouse surprises you with exactly the news that you were not hoping to hear. The good news is that the family courts will spring into action quickly if your ex-spouse throws you a curveball during or after your divorce. To find out more about emergency petitions in Arizona family law, contact a Mesa divorce lawyer.
What is an Emergency Petition in Arizona Family Law?
The family courts of Arizona understand that, by nature, emergencies happen quickly and require quick decisions. This is why Arizona parenting plans include questions about which parent has the final decision about non-emergency medical care for the children, but they do not include provisions about which parent has the final decision about the children’s emergency medical care. If these provisions existed, they would be virtually impossible to enforce, and they might even be dangerous. It would be a terrible idea, in a medical emergency, to wait for your ex-spouse to return your call before you call 911.
You can file an emergency petition to modify physical or legal custody if not doing so would result in an immediate threat of physical harm to your children. Physical custody means parenting time, in other words, which parent is with the children on which nights of the year, and legal custody means the authority to make decisions about the children. If the court receives the petition for emergency modification before 4:30 p.m. on a weekday, it will issue a decision by 5:00 that same day. If it receives the petition after 4:30 p.m., it will issue the decision by noon on the following weekday. Most of the time, the decision is simply to grant the petition as written, but sometimes the judge changes the terms to make them different from what the petitioner originally requested, but still modifies them from the terms of the previous parenting plan.
Most parents who file emergency petitions to modify child custody orders already have an existing parenting plan. If you do not already have a permanent parent plan, but you need an emergency one, you must file a request for a permanent parenting plan at the same time that you file the emergency petition. If the court determines that there was no genuine emergency and that you have abused the emergency petition system, it might hold you in contempt of court.
Emergency Petitions Related to Domestic Violence
Regardless of your relationship status, the legal system acts quickly in response to domestic violence. Emergency protective orders related to domestic violence are the same when you are living with your partner as a married or unmarried couple as they are when you are separated and your divorce is pending, or when your divorce is final. If the court issues a restraining order related to domestic violence, it does so within hours of the 911 call that led police to come to the couple’s house. If the order forbids the parents from interacting with each other directly, you will need an emergency modification to the parenting plan. The family court will revisit the parenting plan as the criminal case arising from the domestic violence incident, if any, progresses.
A protective order enjoining you from directly contacting your ex-spouse does not preclude you from exercising your court-ordered parenting time. Most likely, your parenting time will stay the same, but you will need to change the transportation arrangements so that you do not come into contact with your ex. For example, the court might order your mother to drive the children to your ex’s house instead of you driving them there yourself. It will only order supervised parenting time if it sees that the children would be in danger if they spent time alone with you. Remember that supervised parenting time orders only last six months; every six months, the court will review them, and you will have the opportunity to revert to unsupervised parenting time.
If Your Ex-Spouse Wants to Move Out of Arizona
Another time that the family court must issue a decision on a short deadline is if one parent wants to move out of Arizona, or even to move across the state, where it would take several hours to transport the children from one parent’s house to the other. The parent who wants to move must notify the other parent in writing, by certified mail, at least 45 days before the planned move. If the other parent responds to the notice by petitioning for a change of parenting plan, the court only has a few days to decide how the new parenting plan will work.
Emergency Petitions Related to Financial Crises
If you suffer a financial hardship that will make it impossible to keep your current child support obligations, then do not wait until you have fallen behind on payments before you get the court involved. Instead, you should file a petition with the family court to modify your child support obligations. If you wait, you will still be responsible for the overdue payments, and you might get stuck repaying your child support debts until long after your children have reached adulthood.
Contact Modern Law About Emergency Family Court Petitions
A family law attorney can help you draft an emergency petition to modify a parenting plan. Contact Modern Law in Mesa, Arizona, to discuss your case.
