Show That You Turned over a New Leaf
Video Transcribed: Does your criminal history preclude you from having custody of your child? My name is Brian L. Jackson. I’m an Oklahoma men’s rights lawyer here at Dads.Law where fathers are not disposable, and I want to talk about whether or not a criminal history could preclude you from having custody.
Again, this is one of those ones where it depends on what it is. There are certain types of crimes that set up an automatic presumption against you: domestic violence, sexual abuse, any sexual crime really, any kind of child abuse history or neglect history like that, yes. If you are talking about violent crime, it may not necessarily be an automatic statutory preclusion, but it’s probably going to weigh against you heavily. Non-violent crimes, property crimes, white collar crimes, maybe yes, maybe no. Drug crimes definitely don’t help, but there are some factors that play into this too.
Even with the statutory negative presumption, it’s not absolute. It can be rebutted. One of the things that are going to be important is how recent is your criminal history and what have you done since then. I mean, if you have a bunch of from when you were 18 because you were a dumb kid at 18, but not under the law, so you got in a bunch of trouble, but now you’re relating your thirties and you have a steady job and you make a good living and you do all the right things as a parent, the court’s probably going to look at that differently than if it’s more recent shit where you’re currently up and currently getting in trouble. So, it depends on what it is and it depends on when it happened.
The main things you really want to do with that if it comes up is to be able to show the court that you’ve turned from it and that you recognize the seriousness of your conduct, and that’s how you defend that, and that’s how you deal with that. It can affect your fitness as a custodian. It might be a negative presumption. It’s not automatic preclusion in most cases.
If you have questions about that, reach out to a Child custody attorney in Oklahoma at Dads.Law where fathers are not disposable.
