Marriage of Craver
Court appreciate the trial judges Solomonic approach to this custody and visitation case. He decided to end years of bickering over the logistics of visitation by asking each party to submit a proposed parenting plan, in which each party would assume that he or she had sole physical custody of the two children involved in the case, and would then write the ticket for the other partys visitation with the party giving the more generous visitation the winner. In this case the party promising the more generous visitation was the winner, and the trial judge indeed awarded that party custody. That award required a change of custody from the parent with whom the two daughters had lived with for the previous four years. A good idea perhaps, but even so, Court must reverse. The judges methodology amounted to consigning a custody decision to a process, rather than to informed judicial discretion. It also was inherently flawed in the way that it was conducted because neither side had any opportunity to critique, cross examinez, or otherwise respond to the others proposed plan.
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