How do I get full custody? Well, you got to ask for it. You got to file for it and then you got to go to court and either get agreement, or get a judge to decide that that’s what’s in the best interest of the child, but it depends a little bit on where you start off. So if you are married, then you and your spouse ha defacto kind of have joint custody. You don’t have any legal document. You don’t have any legal determination, but neither one of you has superior rights to the other. So if you want those superior rights, you need to file with the court. And if you file the divorce action requested for custody, or if you don’t want a divorce, you can file a legal separation requesting for custody.

In Oklahoma do I have to allow the father to see my child, or our child? And that answer to that depends. What are the circumstances? If there is a court order in place, then you’ve got to file that court order unless you believe doing so would put the child in eminent danger of irreparable harm, in which case you need to file an emergency to get that changed. You’ve got a duty to protect the child, but you also have a duty to follow a court order.

Who has more rights to a child? Well, it depends. If there’s a court order in place, then it’s obviously going to be decided by that court order. If there is no court order in place, then you’re going to look at, are the parents married or not married? If it’s a child born outside of a marriage, mom has all the rights. Dad has no rights until he establishes them in court. If the parties are married and there’s no order in place, the parties are on equal footing. Neither party has superior rights. The Oklahoma statute says that. The mother doesn’t automatically have more rights than dad. They start off on equal footing until they get into the court, and the court determines that. In relation to everybody else, the parents have the rights. Other people are not on equal footing. They’re way behind because parents, under Oklahoma law and under US Constitution, they’ve got a constitutional right to the care and comfort of their kids. If a third party is going to try to come in and take custody away from the parents, it’s going to take a much higher standard than what’s in the best interest. It’s going to have to show that the parents are unfit or something like that.

Oklahoma family law matters are open to the public, and you can come in and you can watch those proceedings. The exception to that is going to be guardianships, those are private. Adoptions are going to be private, deprived child actions are going to be private. If it’s not one of those, for the most part, it’s open to the general public, you can sit in and watch. Now, another exception, if you’re a potential witness to the case, either one of the parties can invoke the rule of sequestration and then kick everybody out of the courtroom that may be testifying. And that is to make sure that those people testifying don’t get to see prior witness testimony in order to try to conform with it. So those people can be excluded so that they don’t get to watch the trial until after they have testified.

If we’re talking about relinquishing custody, then certainly that is something that you could do. You could give the other parent custody just by signing over custody, and then maybe you could request visitation rights, or maybe you don’t even request visitation rights. And then that person would have custody, but it does not terminate your parental rights. Same thing with a third party. If the other parent is not available to step in or the other parent is unfit and you’re wanting to relinquish, then you could give up guardianship to a third party and say right now it’s in the best interest of my child for somebody else to care for that person. Get a guardianship in place, and guardianship’s are temporary by nature. So they’re indefinite and they stay in effect until they’re terminated, but you could file at any time to terminate that and get your custody back. So that deals with relinquishing or giving up custody. But most of the time when we talk about relinquishment we’re not dealing with just custody, we’re dealing with parental rights, and that’s different.

It depends on how much work goes into it because these attorneys are billing hourly, and there could be additional costs. If you have to do a deposition, you got to pay a court reporter, if you need more evidence, you need a PI, you need a private investigator helping out. If you go to mediation, which mediation in Tulsa County is required before you get a trial date, you’ve got to pay the mediator’s fee. If you need a custody evaluation, then you need to pay a custody evaluator. If you need to appraise the value of a house, then you need an appraiser to handle that for you. You might need a parenting coordinator. You might need a guardian ad litem. There’s all kinds of different costs could go into that in addition to the filing fee and the attorney fee. Depending on how litigated it is, the cost can vary as far as the total cost based on the total number of hours that the attorney puts into the case.

Oklahoma law regarding children is almost always the same thing. We almost always look at the same thing and that is best interest of the child. So we have to determine what is in the best interest of the child. And when we’ve got a standard that broad, there’s a lot of different information that may be relevant to that for a judge to hear, to determine what’s in the best interest of the child.