Ohio Supreme Court denies pedophile & wife custody

PERMANENTLY denying custody of children to their parents is an extreme move that is never made lightly or without good reason. So it was recently when the Ohio Supreme Court decided to deny a convicted pedophile and his wife permanent custody of their children.

The overriding concern of any court dealing with difficult custody cases must be the best interest of the children involved, and the state's high court did not disappoint in its ruling on a Lucas County dispute. In a 6-1 decision, the court upheld the action of Lucas County Children Services to remove two children from their home because of worries about their father.

The father and mother, whose full names were not used in the case to protect the anonymity of their children, were considered safety risks to the youngsters. A report alleging that one of the children suffered from shaken baby syndrome initially led child service agency officials to investigate the family in 2005.

While their investigation did not reveal whether either parent was responsible and did not produce evidence that the father had abused either his son, born in 2004, or a daughter, born two years earlier, it did expose troubling aspects of the father's criminal history. He had been convicted of molesting two young boys in 1991.

The man served prison time for three felonies related to the sexual abuse and completed the terms of his probation, but evidently not to the satisfaction of those who dealt with him in therapy sessions. Therapist testimony suggested the convicted pedophile just went through the motions to terminate his probation.

After the agency had removed the children from his home, it also expressed reservations about the lack of progress the father and mother had made in subsequent counseling. A majority of the justices agreed that the threat of a relapse of pedophilia with the father, and the mother's apparent inability to prevent it, was real enough to keep the children away - permanently.

Justice Paul Pfeifer, the sole dissenter, while acknowledging concern about the father offending again, objected to the couple losing custody of their children for something that only might happen.

But when serious risk to a child's safety goes beyond possible to probable, society is better to err on the side of protecting its most vulnerable members than to take a chance.