Kidnapping By Protective Order. Can That Happen In Oklahoma?
Video Transcribed: Kidnapping by protective order. Could that happen in Oklahoma? I’m Tulsa attorney James Wirth and I’m about to answer that question for you. Okay. Kidnapping by protective order. What does that mean? Essentially that would be somebody filing a protective order on behalf of a child that is your child taking that child away from you.
So can that happen under Oklahoma law? And the answer is yes. As long as the party is a family or household member, they can file a protective order against you on behalf of your child, regardless of whether they have legal rights or custody of that child, that’s what the law says. Let me read that to you for a moment here.
Any adult or emancipated minor household member on behalf of any other family or household member who is a minor own competent. So that’s who can file a protective order, any family or household member on behalf of any minor child residing there. So that can result in some interesting circumstances.
Most of the time we see that where one parent files against the other parent puts the child on there, gets the other parent kicked out of the house and gets them essentially de facto sole custody of that child until they can get into court.
And that’s even if there’s already another custody order in place. But the law doesn’t specify it has to be another parent. Could be a step parent, could be a grandparent, could be an aunt or uncle as long as there’s any blood relation or marital relation and the person was living in the same household, they can file on behalf of your child, essentially taking the child away.
And then there’s nothing you can do about that until the show cause hearing normally said about two weeks out. And then there are certain things that can be done to get the show cause hearing continued that might prevent you from getting to court on it for months maybe.
So this is an issue in the law that we deal with. There are constitutional concerns with that. That’s certainly an attorney would want to raise on your behalf if you’re dealing with that violation of due process and a right to the care and custody of your child.
But we have seen abuses of that with the court and we do want to fight those things. But if this is something you’re dealing with, don’t take this general information, get specific information based on your circumstances. Call an attorney. You can contact me at 918-932-2800