PA House Judiciary — 2026-10-05

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I thank you for holding this hearing. This is an issue that in my tenure in the House of Representatives, probably one of the top issues that I hear from constituent families, from men, women, children who've been affected. Never before in the House have we had an advocate like Representative Flick on this issue. when he came here he's maybe a little bit like a bull in the china closet but we appreciate that when it comes to issues that are important to people and so back when I held this hearing back in 2019 as I was reminded by the majority chairman a little bit different environment and and a different advocate but I want to acknowledge all those who are in the room today an overwhelming majority of you who are here because this issue has personally affected you and your family and your relationship with your children. And today, I am a co-sponsor of House Bill 1499. Am I a co-sponsor of this bill because it's perfect. No, I'm not a co-sponsor because it's perfect. But what it is, is a starting point that we have to work on this issue. No is not the right answer today. The answer is perfecting this bill, this legislation, and moving this issue forward because families, because children, because parents can no longer continue in the process that we have here in the Commonwealth. And as a reflection of his willingness, I know, to continue to perfect his legislation, I know that Representative Flick has already drafted an amendment which would insert the current law's child custody factors into this legislation, looking at that as something that may be missing from his legislation. And so I encourage everyone here today, all those who are testifying, not to come as opponents of the bill, trying to pigeonhole it and make sure that it goes away, not to be seen again for another five years. but as partners in wanting to work on this legislation and make it better so we can actually get to yes and see improvement in this issue for our families and our children here in the Commonwealth.

Representative Flick, you're in order. Good morning, Chairman Briggs, Chairman Kaufman, and members of the Judiciary Committee, and thank you for having me today. I'm State Representative Jamie Flick, and I'm here to speak about House Bill 1499, which would establish a legal presumption and shared custody and equal 50-50 equal parenting time that are in the best interest of a child when both parents are fit, fit, able, and loving. I would also like to thank all of those in attendance today that are here from Ohio, Texas, Missouri, Kentucky, New Jersey, California, Florida, and many other states. Thank you for joining us today. And a special thank you to many of my constituents from the 83rd District and my fellow Pennsylvanians. Members of the committee, I also want to acknowledge and thank members of the domestic violence advocacy community who have joined us today. While we may not agree on every part of this bill, your voice brings very important perspectives. Let me start by being absolutely clear. No one in this room, not a single person in this room, wants to put a child in harm's way. No one supporting House Bill 1499 wants to place a child with an abusive parent. We've heard from families who have spent years, and in many cases tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, navigating custody litigation. We've seen continuance after continuance, evaluation after evaluation, hearing after hearing, and motion after motion. In far too many cases, the process itself becomes a source of harm to the very children that we are trying to protect. We also heard concerns about allegations raised during custody proceedings that later are determined to be false Every allegation of abuse must be taken very seriously and thoroughly investigating We are not arguing that today. The children's safety demands nothing less. But we must also acknowledge a very difficult reality. When false allegations are made, the damage can be devastating. A child can be separated from a loving parent for months, for years, or even for a lifetime. Relationships are fractured, trust is destroyed, and families are financially and emotionally drained. Today, this legislation is supported by 79 co-sponsors. Today, this legislation is supported by 79 co-sponsors. That level of support is rarely seen for legislation of this significance and reflects broad recognition that our custody system deserves reform. Those 79 co-sponsors include nearly 30 members from the opposite party of the prime sponsor and legislators from every corner of this commonwealth. That is unheard of, the bipartisanship in this bill. Collectively, those 79 members, which include Chairman Kaufman, represent more than 5 million Pennsylvanians. 79 co-sponsors represent 5 million Pennsylvanians that are begging to be heard. Pennsylvania families are frustrated. Many feel that for years they've been denied the opportunity to have their concerns heard. They describe a system marked by continuance after continuance, guardian ad litem after guardian ad litem, allegation after allegation, mounting legal cost, and prolonged conflict that too often leaves children caught right in the middle. Whether one agrees with their conclusion or not, their frustration is real, their experience is real, and their belief that the system can and should work better for children is very real. Chairman, again, I want to respectfully thank you for providing one of the eight speaking slots to my sole testifier, Judge Micah Pence from Kentucky. While I respect the committee's prerogative in organizing this meeting, I would be less than candid if I did not say that a 7 to 1 ratio seems politically motivated. That being said, we are privileged to have the Honorable Judge Pence here today. Judge Pence is the family court judge for Kentucky's 43rd Circuit. In 2018, she made history in that circuit as the first elected female judge and the youngest circuit judge. Prior to taking the bench, Judge Pence practiced law in 22 counties across the Commonwealth of Kentucky, with a focus in family law, serving as a GAL in dependency, neglect, and abuse cases. There may be no better expert in the entire country than Judge Pence. Since taking the bench, Judge Pence has been active with local, state, and national organizations to help reform court practices and laws to better serve children and families in Kentucky and beyond. She has represented Kentucky judges. So she is the sole person that is selected from Kentucky to represent the Kentucky judges at the National Judicial Leadership Summit on Child Welfare, and she's done that since 2019. She testified before legislative committees in Kentucky Alabama Oklahoma Colorado and of course today here in Pennsylvania Regarding concerns and issues in child welfare system and how the court system has adapted to equal parenting Judge Pence, we welcome you to Pennsylvania. Mr. Chairman, today, after waiting years, after hearing from countless families, after securing the support of 79 members of this House, I'm here more convinced than ever that doing nothing is no longer acceptable. Parents are asking to have us have the courage to put children ahead of politics, ahead of special interests, and ahead of the status quo. I ask each of you on this committee to pause just for a moment. Imagine walking into a courtroom, looking up at a judge, that you've never met, and being told in a matter of minutes that your role in your child's everyday life is now restricted. Imagine being told that your love, your guidance, and your daily presence in your child's life has been reduced to an every other weekend schedule on a piece of paper, not because you did anything wrong, and not because you don't love your child, but simply because a broken system defaulted to a winner-take-all mentality. That is the devastating reality for thousands of fit, loving fathers and mothers across Pennsylvania today. They are not asking for special treatment. They are just asking for a fair starting point. Let's give them that. Let's pass House Bill 1499. Thank you.

Thank you. Oh, push to the bottom. There should be a little green light and just slide it towards you. All right, now I have a green light. That was in the notes I was supposed to say. Thank you. All right, I can be the guinea pig. That's fine. But again, thank you to the Judiciary Committee for inviting me to be here. I've been able to speak with some of the people who will testify today. And I first want to make it clear, I'm not here as a proponent or an opponent of this bill. I'm not a member of your citizenry. I'm not a voter of Pennsylvania. I'm here to say I've done this for eight years. We passed equal parenting time as a presumption eight years ago in Kentucky in 2018. And I'm here to tell you the experiences that I've had. I'll tell you in 2018, when this was very quickly passed, as there was a very firm majority in our house at that time, this was passed very quickly without a lot of comment from the Bar Association, from the judges, from any of us. And I would have been sitting right here and testifying that I thought this was a bad idea. I thought it would have been a bad idea. I'm worried about whether a child going back and forth too often is good for them. Is this a good idea? Can parents work together and actually make these decisions? And I would have testified against this, and I would have been wrong. The insight that I have is just to say, I found something that works great, and I want to tell you about it too. And that's the only reason that I'm here. I've seen this work. um I had Raelle Lepicenta asked me earlier from Mothers Against Child Abuse she said when was that aha moment that you that you realized that this could really work I said well it was after talking to one of the best therapists that testifies in our local family courts I was still an attorney at the time right before I became judge and I asked her I was like tell me is this 50-50 thing is this really gonna work is this even possible to be good for a child and she said absolutely I see it work all the time as long as one of the parents isn't a narcissist. And that made sense to me. And that's true. And that's the factors that we're looking at. It can work as long as one of the parents is not an abuser. As long as one of the parents is not unfit. As long as one of the parents is not attempting to undermine the other one. This only works when you have two good parents. And one of the things that I love about the law that I get to apply every day is that it's maximizing time with a parent. Is it always equal? Rarely. It's usually pretty close. Okay, it usually works around the work schedules of the parents. I'm in a rural area in Kentucky, and our workforce and having people that are able to go into the factories and work is a big deal. We've had a lot of factories leave, and we're trying to recruit new factories in our area. What we have found is that when you have mom working one shift and dad working the opposite, you can have a workforce, two incomes for a family, and still have a majority of time with that child. And so it has been very unique for me to see the different employers work around this so that parents now are working maybe longer hours but fewer days. They're getting more quality time with their children but also not paying as much for child care. I don't know what you have available in Pennsylvania, but having child care anytime after 4 o'clock is a problem in our area. So having that other parent and working your work schedules around your child's schedule so that one of you is providing care has been a benefit of this that none of us expected to see. But it worked out great especially for blue families especially for those families of I know that I see some law enforcement around the room today Our first responders and law enforcement families so many of those can do every other weekend They working weekends. My dad, my mother and father were both in law enforcement. One or both of them was working every weekend of my life, either Saturday or Sunday. If I had only gotten to see one parent every other weekend, I would have never seen them. They were never off on weekends. So that's a system that simply doesn't work. So dividing that time between those two days during the week that maybe dad has fully off is something that's important to focus on. Again, what we start with is time availability. Two good parents, and then we go to who can care for the child during that time. And then it becomes a lot easier. When it's equal parenting and both people walk into a room with the same power and the same goal, which is to do what's best for their child, I don't have to make the decisions anymore. This has been in effect for eight years. And two good parents will sit down with a mediator, figure out what makes it work, what they can do different in their schedules. and I have less litigation. The hostile litigation that I used to see, I just don't see anymore. I do. There are always those cases. There are always going to be those people that are going to fight. But before, you didn't know where you stood when you walked into the courtroom, right? Were you going to get 50-50? Probably not. Were you going to get every other weekend and wanted more than that? The unknown of walking into a courtroom, what are you going to do? You're going to build your arsenal. You're going to come ready with everything that other parent has ever done wrong. Everything. Because you don't know where you stand with the court. I love the best interest factors. We've utilized those for a long time in Kentucky. But the problem that we didn't realize was the parties didn't get it. They didn't understand when they walked through the door whether the best interest factors meant they were going to get two days with their child. child three days, four days, five days. We understood it as lawyers and judges, but society didn't get it. The parents didn't get it. They didn't know what they were entitled to, what was best for their child, and what they should expect. They do now. And so that makes the guesswork and uncertainty disappear in a lot of ways. I spoke with one of my family law attorney friends last night because I'm not practicing anymore. I don't know what it's like to have those clients walk in and she said, it's great. I can explain it to them like this. Right now you're here. Tell me why the other party should be down here. And then we start to have a discussion. and if there's domestic and i always explain if there's domestic violence or abuse of any kind or substance abuse in their history you are no longer here the other party goes to here but as long as you're both good parents you're here unless you give me a reason they shouldn't be and then we go to practicalities we were wrong to believe that a child going back and forth between two places was not good for them. And there's been research to show that. I quoted Vowles in what I submitted to you all, so I'll let you look into what Laura Vowles published in 2023. But the reality is now a child has two houses not one And that the most important part A child should not have one house that they live in and another house that they visit It on the parents to make sure both of those homes feel like that child home that they have clothes at both places, that they're not bringing a bag back and forth, that dad has a has a glove if they're playing baseball and so does mom. That's on the parents. This child didn't choose to go back and forth, so it's on the parents to make sure they have everything they need at each house. And they feel like they belong. When you're a visiting, when you feel as if you're visiting at one of your parents' home, that bond is never going to be the same. In a way, it makes you feel unwanted. Because let's be honest, it doesn't just stay just your parent at that home. There are going to be new people welcomed in, maybe other additional children. So it's important that that bond be strong with both children, not just Disney World at one and hard work at the other. Finally, when it comes to abuse, I want to make very clear, no one wants these children to be abused. One of the things that I'm proudest to see in Kentucky is our rates of abuse drop. And you might think, what does this have to do with that? A lot. Because now a child has two trusted adults, not just mom, not just dad, but they have someone to go to. For example, I have more parents file domestic abuse complaints about violence that happened on their former partner. So if the child is in the home, you can file a domestic violence complaint on behalf of the child to protect the child. All right? We know that victims aren't always ready to step forward. So, for example, mom's boyfriend is abusing her. Mom calls dad and says, can you come get the kids? So-and-so is going crazy. Dad comes and gets the kids, gets them out of the situation, calls mom the next day. Oh, no, no, he's convinced me. It's not going to happen again. he's going to change. Dad now has the power to file a domestic violence petition on behalf of those children. In the end, it ends up benefiting mom because it gives her the strength to walk away from that domestic violence relationship because I'm not letting those kids go back if that boyfriend was abusing mom in their presence. And I'm going to connect her with a domestic violence advocate immediately to help her through that situation. It normally takes victims three times to leave, but now in Kentucky it only takes children one. And that's what's made the biggest difference. The abusers that abuse our children aren't normally their parents. It is normally that third party, that boyfriend, girlfriend, uncle, whoever it might be in a child's life. But if you have two trusted parents, that child's going to feel comfortable telling one of them. If you have both parents involved on a regular basis, they're more likely to confide in one parent. So now we see more children coming forward, and we don't see their lives upended when they have to be removed from one parent because they have a solid parent in the other, someone that they still share that bond with. Again, if I have anything to leave with you all today, I'm not here to say what you should do. Here are the benefits that I've seen. Adapt your legislation as you think is appropriate for the people of Pennsylvania. But the one biggest thing is the parents, the parties, knowing what the expectation is before they walk in. We as lawyers legislators judges we know and we forget that sometimes these parties don know what emotion is They don understand what the statute says but they understand equal And in eight years, that has become the norm in Kentucky. I told my niece and nephew who are 23 years old that have a one and a half year old little girl, I was coming to Pennsylvania and they said, what do you mean you're going to Pennsylvania to talk about equal parenting? Isn't that the way it is everywhere? And they said, well, where do they start then? if they don't start at equal time? And I said, I don't know. I don't live in Pennsylvania. I've never been into a Pennsylvania court. I don't know where they start. But it's important that your people do, that your people know where things start because that's where litigation reduces. They don't need to come in and say all the bad things. They don't need a judge to make their decisions. They need to be empowered as the parents of that child to make the best decisions for their child and for me to stay out of the process. Thank you again for letting me be here today. I appreciate your time, and I wish you all the best of luck.

Yes, good morning, Chair Briggs, Chair Kaufman. And I would also add to the introduction that this legislature appointed me to be the chair of the Joint State Government Advisory Committee on Domestic Relations last year. Chair Briggs and Chair Kaufman are part of the task force to that Joint State Commission. And we are a nonpartisan group of 30 judges and lawyers who advise this body on legislation. There is a submission, written submission from that group. There's also a written submission from the Pennsylvania Conference of State Trial Judges. I appear with my colleague, Judge Tuhill. As you mentioned, she was elected to the bench in Luzerne County in 2021 and served for 11 years in the legislature, also on this committee, and was vice chair of your House Committee on Children and Youth. She's co-chair of the Family Court section of the Pennsylvania Conference of State Trial Judges. Montgomery County, where I'm from, I'm an administrative judge of our family division. We have nine judges in our family division. We are the second largest county in the state with custody filings just behind Philadelphia. There were 40,000 custody filings just last year. Attached to the remarks from the PCSTJ is a list of the counties and the number of filings for each custody in each of the counties. each of the 67 counties. So we have a large volume business, 40,000 filings across 67 counties. I would like to compliment Representative Flick with his interest and commitment to family court. Having been involved in family court matters for 42 years, I've often struggled with some of the inability to get your attention, and obviously he's gotten your attention. I was also unaware that there had been an amendment. I think Chair Kaufman mentioned at the beginning that there might have been an amendment recently to incorporate the factors. I think we'd have to look at that to see what that says. Maybe after reviewing the amendment, there may actually be room for compromise on this in the end. But let me say at the overview, we're not against 50-50. I said to Representative Flake, if you talk to the lawyers in my county, they would probably tell you he's a 50-50 judge. Judges are often, at the beginning, thinking about 50-50, and from there, what the schedule should actually look like. Many of the litigants that appear before me have 50-50, but there's no presumption on the part of the judge that it should be 50-50. It's up to the litigants to present their case and for us to decide what's best for every individual child. And Judge Pence talked about the power of litigants when they walk in the courtroom. Our litigants in Pennsylvania are on equal footing now, and they have been for many, many years. Our statute specifically says there shall be no presumption that custody should be awarded to a particular parent. So they're already walking in on equal footing. And there's some discussion about what we used to call the tender years doctrine. Kentucky, by the way, not to critique, but to observe, Kentucky up until 2018, from my understanding of the remarks from Judge Pence when she appeared at a prior proceeding in this House, was that they lived with the tender year doctrine until 2018. So they jumped from what I would say the shackles of the tender year doctrine, because that's how I would observe it. Many of us fought hard for our father clients. I'm old enough to remember those days when we would walk into a courtroom representing a father, and it would take moving a mountain to get more than the garden variety schedule every other weekend, Wednesday for dinner. We had to fight hard for our clients. That was the 80s, the 90s, spilled over a little bit to the 2000s. And then what happened? Your body enacted custody factors. Did we love that at the time? No. Why? Because it required a lot of work on our part. But it's good work. It's legitimate work. You gave us 16 factors. You spent a lot of time on what those factors should look like. You worked jointly with the Joint State Commission, and that's what evolved. We're way past the tenure years doctrine in Pennsylvania. It was abolished by the Supreme Court in 1977. So we're way past that. We've been living with the factors that you enacted since 2015. In the last two years, you've tweaked those factors. It was a legitimate time period to look back and see how we might make them better, how we can improve them. And we did. We worked collaboratively with you folks on those factors, beginning with the changes that were implemented as a result of the Cadence Law. I'm not going to go into that because I know there's other speakers that will talk about that. And then last year, we tweaked the factors a little bit. You know what we added to the factors? Probably the most important factor that judges look at, above all things in a custody case, the party's employment schedule. If you're leaving for work at 5 a.m. or 6 a.m., you're not available for that child in the morning. If you work at night, you're not available for that child, right? So the employment schedule, I would dare say, for the 450 judges across the Commonwealth, those who serve in family court, probably the first question that comes out of their mouth is, what are the employment schedules? What are we talking about? How can we fashion a schedule that's going to, quote, work for the family? And you folks have put the child at the center of our evaluation Everything that we look at at the factors applies to the child more than anything not just the parent And so you elevating what a parent may want over what the child may need. And each child is different. You could have four kids in the same family and each one of those kids could have a different perspective and a different need. Can an autistic kid go back and forth between houses every two days? I mean think about it 50-50 means the child's going back and forth. You're staying in your house, okay, you're going to bed in the same bedroom every night. They're going back and forth possibly every two days, maybe every three days, they're going back and forth, back and forth. And it usually works if parents can work it out, if parents can collaborate. We don't see every case where they're collaborating, where they're able to co-parent, where they're able to communicate, where they're able to do a custody exchange in the parking lot without an outburst and creating anxiety for that child. Think of the anxiety a child may have going back and forth every two days or every week. A week on, week off, you're not going to see your parent for a week. How is that equality? So the parents have the power right now. And I think there's also a misconception that every case we have starts with two parents living in the same house. The majority of our cases have now become blended families, parents that never lived together, parents that never parented together. This is the makeup of our population now that comes into custody court. They're not all, like in quotes, perfect families living in houses together. and on those cases, the majority of them are going to have a 50-50 schedule. But we're dealing with the gambit. We're dealing with parents that have substance abuse. Serious, serious mental health issues, okay, where they might require supervision because of those two factors. Should they start out on the same footing? Right now they do start out on the same footing because they're walking in the courtroom with no presumptions. So it's important to point out we're not against 50-50. I would say the majority of my cases end up being 50-50. It may not be at the beginning of the case because there may be a need. If the parent hasn't seen a child for months or years, they should start out on the same footing walking in. They do start out on the same footing, but they require me to go through those factors. Those factors are important to that child, and the child should be at the forefront. And you've done that. What does this do to the well-reasoned preference of the child? You have a 15- or 16-year-old. They don't get a say about any of this. You've at least enabled them not to make the decision for us, but to give us the requirement that we obtain their input. Very important. If anyone has a teenager, it's very important to have a teenager understand to be able to cooperate on the orders that we entered. I'll now turn to my colleague who's on the screen there, I think, to add the remainder of our remarks.

Hello, Mr. Chairman. I unmuted myself. Does that work? Yeah, we can hear you now. Thank you. So, hello, I'm Judge Tara Tuhill. I'd like to thank the chairs and the members of the committee. I appreciate this opportunity I the co of the state as Judge Clifford said the state court family law section And myself the other co and myself we submitted six pages of testimony for your consideration And I do think that Judge Clifford really covered a lot of what the judges would have to say. So I'm just going to go through just my major points. And I do appreciate very much hearing as well, Judge Pence, and I want to thank her for coming to Pennsylvania and, you know, sharing information with us. And interestingly, when I was a sitting lawmaker, I was the co-sponsor. I wasn't the prime sponsor, but I was one of the co-sponsors of the 50-50 legislation because equal shared parenting has the word equality in it. And how can you not be for equality? So after years now of presiding over family court cases, including interviewing children in high conflict cases, this application of a presumption would suit the objectives of some parents, but not suit the individual child's needs all of the time. A blanket presumption gets us away from the best interests of the individual child in each of these individual cases, and it is more parent-focused. So I just want to reiterate, as Judge Clifford stated, Pennsylvania, we moved away from tender years many years ago with the help of the legislature, and this was a presumption favoring the mother of a young child. And there are many sad stories, you know, today that people share regarding how unfair the system was to those families. And this doctrine evolved over time and was then abolished. So prior, fathers used to have to overcome this maternal presumption. And upon my review, I think Kentucky just did away with that in 2018, I believe. So our state was a little bit ahead with regard to that. And judges, furthermore, it's very important. Judges, when you come into the courtroom, judges are not allowed to favor one gender over another. They can't use any gender preference. They have to be gender neutral. So the factors allow us, the parents that come in, they're building up their case. So in a way, I mean, if you're starting it, you don't have any facts and evidence on either, you're starting. And then each parent is building up their case using the factors. So as a judge, you're always equally considering everything. If you have two good, healthy parents, as Judge Pence was referencing, judges are trying to give the parent that if it's healthy for a child, judges are trying to maximize that time. Obviously, we know the clock is ticking like you have 18 years where you could potentially be in court litigation. And parents, that's your time where you can get that time with your child. So if it's in the best interest of the child, then we're trying to maximize that. And that's where the schedules come into play. Not so much the splitting of the child like you would split your property or split your car where you get 50 And it doesn matter who home at the other house who the caretaker is what the criminal background is And so it should be noted a presumption may create a baseline of 50 which never existed before in some of these cases So you can have a parent show up after they've been missing for a number of years. You could have a father who is primary the child's entire life, and that could be removed. Um, the, I know in the bill, the primary physical, that is something that even when parents can get 50 50, they're still fighting over who has primary because it can determine the school district. So we have parents that live, you know, 40 minutes in one county. They still live 40 minutes from each other. That's 80 minutes in a car every two days. So, you know, 40 minutes, 40 minutes. And you can have a lot of quality time in the vehicle, but it has to be right for that child. And so just from day one in court, I just wanted to reiterate, parents can agree. They can walk into court. You go to the conference level and parents can agree to 50-50. They can agree to that shared custody. And but we as judges have a duty to decide these highly litigated, high conflict cases. It would be easy to just take a cookie cutter for each family and put it at 50-50. But we would be hearing less facts, making less decisions. And as Judge Clifford put forward, the factors like the cookie cutter approach is disregarding these complex, high conflict families. You know, they're fighting, they're arguing in the street with each other. Every custody exchange is miserable because there's such vitriol and anger between the parties. That can be a very uncomfortable situation for the children, for the child who has to sit through those increased exchanges. We see children that have anxiety and stress disorders. They have adjustment disorders. We have children in the same home that have different needs and different preferences. So if you come in with a presumption 50-50, you're also kind of shoving that child preference to the side, which it has to be mature. It has to be well-reasoned. And so, oh, also one thing I wanted to bring up was there is concern amongst the judges just with the use of the clear and convincing as a standard. it could be difficult for self-represented litigants as well as because they'd have to put forth and meet a clear and convincing standard and there were I counted them but there were I think there's preponderance which is the standard we use in our PFA cases Florida Kentucky was clear and convincing Florida, Missouri, and I think Mississippi. They were preponderance as a standard. But I want to thank you for having me, and you could just mute me if I'm going for too long. But thank you for this opportunity.

I'm going to go to Chairman Kaufman. I'm going to hold my question if they don't go too long. I do have a couple questions, but I know where to get everyone to. So, Chairman Kaufman. Okay, in the interest of time, I've been trying to find data from our county courts regarding gender on custodial parents. and I'm not finding that. And for Judge Clifford and Judge Tuhill, where is that data? Is it kept? And if it's not kept, or maybe I'm missing it, but if it's not kept, why don't we have this just for informational purposes so we can have that and understand what's happening in the common law?

Okay. Is that... Representative, Tara, I've known you for a long while. Do you have anything to add on that?

I mean, that would be an enormous task of 40,000 statewide to determine how each county, each – I mean, I have nine judges in family, so. Well, I appreciate that. I do think it would be valuable information because I think while I hear what you're saying and how you handle it, I have heard anecdotal evidence of certain judges in certain counties being not like you. And I think that would... Well... That wasn't meant to be an applause line. It was just what came out of my mouth. With all due respect, there may be people that would agree with that's not a good thing. But I think the issue is if you have that judge, Chair, if you have that judge and you don't like that decision, you're guaranteed two things right now. you're guaranteed that that judge is required to put on the record either in writing or verbally why they made that decision. That's the beauty of what you've done with the factors because as a lawyer you would walk out of the courtroom and you hand the order to your client and it was primary to mom dad every other weekend and your client would say well what just happened We just spent a day or two whatever We had no way of knowing what the judge was thinking. And the only way you could find out what that judge was thinking was to file an appeal. And on appeal, they'd have to do an opinion. But now, since you put the factors in place going back to 2011, we have to go through every single one. And I guarantee you, Superior Court takes that seriously. If you miss one of the 11 now, they will remand if you miss addressing one of the factors. And they encourage us to emphasize what weight we put on each of those factors. That's number one. Number two, if you feel like you're that litigant, you can file an appeal to Superior Court. And people do. There's a huge volume of appeals on family court matters to Superior Court. So you have two safeguards right now in place. Shifting to everybody is on the equal footing at the very beginning is not child-centric. You're not looking at what the child may need. You're looking at what the parent may need or what the parent may want. There are strategic reasons in some cases for parents to, it doesn't matter what sex they're in, okay? They can file for modifications. They may be looking for an advantage in the support case. I've had litigants sit on the stand and say if I don't get 50-50, if I get 50-50, I can reduce my child support. I mean, that's part of the whole mix. That gives us the opportunity to vet all these things and decide is the motivation the right motivation and what works for that child. Let us keep what we have now, which addresses that child's needs, not what the parent wants. I appreciate the response. I hear your response. I still don't think it's too much to ask for data on the issue and gives us more information to go from. Well, it's a big – the AOPC has a big department. Well, I see AOPC here, so I'll just twist his arm afterward. Yeah. Thank you.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for spending so much time with us, and thank you for traveling as far as Kentucky and then Montgomery County and so on. I am an orphan's court attorney, so the questions that I have for you after hearing your testimony, they are not gotcha questions by any means. I'm just an objective, outsiding practitioner that would like to get some info from the three of you. So whether we are using the mechanism in Kentucky where there's a presumption of 50-50 or whether we are using the mechanism that you two just spoke about where we're looking at the interest of the child, and you both testified that going into a courtroom when parties come in, you you already assigned basically 50-50. So under either of those mechanisms, I would expect as an objective outsider that whenever you look at fathers and mothers across the state, that it would be divided 50-50 whenever you assess primary physical or full physical custody. But as you dig into the data in this state, across the state, fathers only have primary physical custody 14% of the time. So my questions are, this is an objective outsider, why do fathers only have primary custody 14% of the time? Do you think that that's a problem? And if you do think that's a problem, what do you propose that we do to fix it? Because this proposal is to have a rebuttable presumption. Is there another proposal or another thing that you see as a practitioner that has been doing this for a long time? And that's for the three of you.

Sure. So to answer your question, this is research that I had done prior to this. And it is not maintained by the counties directly. These are through case studies and what have you that are just generally across the state. But to answer your question, from the research that I have, fathers have majority physical custody 14% of the time, and mothers have it 71% of the time.

That would be the difference. Well, 30%?

Well, I don't know what the data is.

I mean, there were 40,000 filings last year.

The size of the data pool from what we pulled was 1,000.

Were they from the same county? No, they were from all 67. Okay.

Thank you. Thank you, judges. And I think, you know, we have to be very careful with data when we don't know where it's coming from, and it's not. We just kind of discuss that AOPC is not tracking it. So that's who I would trust these numbers from. So we're going to go to – and just a reminder, we're going to try to speed this along. But, Rep. Grupa, I'm not going to try to cut you off, but just be sensitive of our time. Thank you.

So just to clarify, that is exactly what we do is we use our best interest factors. So our best interest factors are in the same statute as we begin at equal time sharing. And ours is just a preponderance of the evidence. It's not clear and convincing evidence. So our standard is a little different than the legislation that's been proposed. So basically, yes, the first document that we have is usually a petition, right? So if there's allegations of domestic violence or abuse, neglect, et cetera, it's going to be in that petition. And I'm first going to see whether or not that is valid before we get to it. So, yes, you're going to see whether or not 50-50 applies or whether one of those other circumstances occur before you even start at 50-50. And then you're going to be practical. Because something else, the legislation that we have that I apply, again, I've not read every statute that has been, or bill that's been proposed across the nation. I can just tell you about mine. Um, if, if equal parenting is not what is able to occur, joint custody and equal shared parenting time is in the best interest. However, if a deviation from equal parenting time is warranted, the court shall construct a parenting time schedule, which maximizes the time each parent or de facto custodian has the child and is consistent with ensuring the child's welfare. So those are the other two factors. When 50-50 is not warranted, when it's not in the best interest, then we're going to make sure we're maximizing time with a parent, not with babysitter, stepdad, stepmom, et cetera. Prioritize a parent if they're available and to ensure the child's welfare. So that's where we start. Because we only see the worst cases, we're not giving good parents enough credit.

That's not day-to-day. just a scheduled thing. That is both parents having the same routines and calling each other when something goes wrong. So if my child's having a meltdown at school, they're going to call dad. They're not going to call me. If my child is crying and upset, they're going to call me. It's me, not dad. Those are day-to-day joint parenting decisions that have to be made. And because we have equal power and no one is pulling things against each other, we're able to jointly parent. and again we're always applying those best interest factors the anxiety issue is a big one I have a lot of children who have anxiety for tests at school school is a source of a lot more anxiety after COVID than it was before so we're going to make sure a child stays all night with the most comfortable parent it has helping with homework the night before Fridays because Fridays are generally test day at schools in Kentucky so we make those adaptations and we're making those suggestions and parents are like, yeah, that makes sense. As opposed to saying, but she's a liar and this one time she did this bad. So that's, so our conversations are more of these practical conversations as opposed to this one time dad fell asleep while he was watching the child or this one time mom did this because that's what it was before. And now it's okay. Practically dad cannot do nighttime routine because our child with autism does not handle that well. We'd like to work on that but we're not there yet. Same thing with a small child. A child that's one or two, frequency is more important than duration. Overnights are not as important as that child being able to see both parents every day and so we're going to take that into consideration and work on a small graduated scale. If something goes wrong we'll come back and reconsider. But again we're helping put them on the path to make these decisions themselves without us being involved. And one quick comment if the chairman will indulge me. The cases where a

I would have to disagree with that. The ones that are the most difficult are the ones where there are challenges, where there is substance abuse. Those are the toughest ones because we want to make sure each parent has equal access to the child and we have to devise a schedule to fit that child because of all those other issues. And everything she just said, we already do that with the factors. Every single thing that was just mentioned goes to the fact that you look at the child and decide what is best for the child, not what the parent thinks that they should deserve. Thank you. Thank you. So I was going to have one more representative

And thank you, judges, for being here today. And good to see you, Judge Tuhill, even if it's through a screen. I am from Luzerne County, so Judge Tuhill and I go way back. And I think that she can tell you that I am the strongest advocate for our children, between sitting on the CAC boards and the abuse children and the CASA boards and doing everything I can to protect the children. So the child is always the most important factor to me. But I've heard some talk and discussion today, and I am not an attorney, but I have gone through this with family. And if we're going to presume, and that's what we say we're going to do, why can't we put it on paper that we presume it's going to be at 50-50? Instead of having two families when a couple decides that they can no longer stay together, all of a sudden decide each family is going to attack each other and try to find something wrong with the other My family went through that because they were fighting both parents good parents fighting for custody of the child. And then all of a sudden, both families were fighting against each other trying to say, he did this, she did this, he did this. Do you remember when he did that? And now you're hiring private investigators. Now you're going into litigation. Now each family has created discourse where we could have been a united force so that the grandparents, the aunts and the uncles could have been charged instead of creating enemies of each other. It's very difficult. And I'm just curious why we can't just put it in writing. It's presumed 50-50. And then let the argument begin from there. But at least both parents, good parents, walk through the door. And look, if we've got drug abuse, if we've got child abuse, We know that. That's easy to record. The PFAs are on records. That's easy to see. So all of a sudden, that 50-50 moves. But we're dividing more than just parents and children. We're dividing grandparents and aunts and uncles and creating a society that is angry at each other instead of supporting the child that needs the support of the entire family. So I'm just curious, like, really, what is the pushback that we can't start at 50-50 because we understand that, you know, we say you guys do that, but not everybody does that across the state, and I have witnessed that myself. So that's where I am.

I would just suggest that we've never been in favor of presumptions, Representative. We've lived under the tenure-years doctrine presumption for 30 years. You're going from one presumption to yet another presumption when we've already developed a time frame, a framework for us to operate. And one of the things you said, you presume that families were coming from an intact family. As I mentioned in my remarks, maybe 50 to 60 percent of the cases that we see, they're not in an intact family. They don't live together. They've never parented together. And that's a large percentage. And again, you're now presuming that there's an intact family. And I would agree with you to some extent. if it is an intact family, and I think I mentioned that, if it is an intact family, we start out with, in our own mind, why shouldn't this schedule be roughly equal and tell us why, and that's why we have the factor. Thank you.

Tight.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman and both chairmen. And thank you for coming. And Judge, thank you for your – all the judges, thank you for your service. I'm a practicing attorney at this moment, and I'm going to get to the point because I said I would. So we allow criminals to be presumed not guilty unless proven guilty. Why shouldn't we – and there's 67 counties with roughly probably 1,000 judges. In your county where I'm at, we have nine judges, four of them to five of them do family law. and they all bring in their own biases and their own thought process and their own opinion on what should happen and let's not forget about the senior judges who sit a lot of times and come in and decide things for our our litigants as well but getting back to the point I was going to make why are we affording criminals the right to have a presumption of not guilty why shouldn two good parents that come in front of the court have that same presumption unless proven otherwise Judge I appreciate the fact that you say that they come in at 50 in your courtroom and that awesome Those courtrooms that those judges do that, it's great. Why should our litigants across Pennsylvania be playing Russian roulette? Because not every judge thinks the way you do. Not every attorney thinks the way you do. and and and i didn't do this for the applause i want to commend you for being 50 50 because when you come into that courtroom knowing that it's 50 50 it changes the landscape of how the attorneys act and how the litigants act as well so why can't we just have the presumption and let the two parties prove that the other one isn't deserving of it and it's good for the children to

But aren't you doing that exactly by not saying it's 50-50 when there's two parents, one child, or two child children? I mean, it goes both ways. Why not start with the 50-50 premise until it's proven otherwise?

And I practice in more than one county, Your Honor. Again, I want to applaud you for being that kind of judge.

But again, a lot of people have to play Russian roulette with who they get as a judge.

We're going to go to panel two.

My understanding was the amendment added all of those factors. Is that not what we said?

I don't know. This has been introduced for 20 years. Somebody drops an amendment.

Does a child have a voice I just want to clarify The tender years document Kentucky has been ahead in the court system for a while 1978 is when we got rid of the tender years document in 2019 1499 is not protecting good... I mean, we want to protect the child and the unique factors of the whole situation. That's what we've been fighting so hard for. Going in, then that's what's best. If you're having to rely on a judge to decide what's best, then this is never going to be best for a child to put them in the middle of litigation. I just encourage you all to look at the bill and make it better. That's what today's about.

Oh, wow. So make sure the green button's lit and pull it close. Chairman Briggs, Chairman Kaufman, members of the Judiciary Committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today to present the position on behalf of Just pull it a little bit closer. Thank you. I know it's awkward. Pennsylvania Bar Association as the current chair of the Family Law Section and to testify regarding the importance of principled, child-focused decisions in custody cases. Before I go further, I want to say that it has been stated this morning that the PBA has refused to meet with the sponsor of the bill, and that is patently not true. We have met with the bill's sponsor and have talked with the bill's sponsor, and we remain ready to work together. The PBA's official position is we oppose 1499 and any bill that contains any presumption of custody consistent with our positions on similar bills in the past. Our current statutory structure already provides equal footing to both parents. 5327A states, in any action regarding custody of the child, there shall be no presumption in favor of a particular parent. Our custody statute, as Judge Clifford went on, was amended in 2011 to include enumerated specific factors judges are required to consider in every case. There has always been an overarching best interest of the child standard, and these factors are to be reviewed in determining what is best. And most recently, those factors relating to the safety of the child will be given weighted consideration. These factors represented a major change in the law, and what they've done is they've caused judges to pause and really think about each particular factor as they construct their overall decision. And as Judge Clifford pointed out, they also allowed litigants to know exactly where the court was coming from. These factors are so important that Representative Flick's amendment to Representative Hanbridge's House Bill 378, to send the factors to all litigants in a custody action, was strongly supported by the PABA. If we have a presumption, what happens to the public's confidence on the judiciary? It says we don't trust judges to make a learned, well-reasoned, detailed decision about the most important thing in our state, our children. A presumption jumps to the ultimate conclusion and works backwards. The problems are with a 50-50 is it creates an unfair evidentiary burden on the parent who may very well have a legitimate reason that equal custody is not in the child's best interest or in the best interest for this family. It reduces all families and children of separating parents to no more than a template. What do we need judges for? Nobody enters the family law arena as a hearing officer, a judge, or a lawyer, or psychologist because it's easy. It's the hardest, most time-consuming, most taxing, emotionally draining, and intellectually challenging and exhausting work that there is. I happen to love it, but that's the way it is. And we're all in it because we care about the children. The children of this common world deserve more than to be forced into a peg, whether they fit it or not. Presumptive decision-making, as opposed to a personalized, case-by-case, factor-by-factor analysis, seems barbaric and backward compared to where Pennsylvania custody law has evolved. There's no reason to change the evidentiary burden now and place it on the parent who wants to show uniqueness of their child or family situation. After 40 years of practice, quoting the words of Oprah Winfrey, this I know for sure. You can take to the bank, every kid is different, every family is different, the dynamics between every set of parents is different. And it is a stretch of logic when you have a couple who can no longer be married to each other or have never lived together to suddenly co-parent and cooperate and do all the attendant communication required by an equal physical exchange. There are not enough resources to help these parents. There are not enough co-parent counselors or programs or money to pay for these therapists to help these people to communicate for the benefit of this child. After 40 years of practice I have seen changes in what it means to be a family. There are more blended families. What about separating siblings? What about step siblings? People move a lot more. We have same-sex couples. Research has grown tremendously especially in the regard to early childhood development and what's best for children at different ages, particularly ages 1 to 5 when their brains are developing faster than any one can

I've appeared before this committee and other gatherings of General Assembly many times over more than three decades. I'm pleased to appear today solely in my personal capacity as a long-time child advocacy practitioner. I retired from the Support Center for Child Advocacy after 33 years, but I remain an active pro bono practitioner, representing parents and children in nonprofit organizations. At Child Advocates, we developed a model known as child-centered advocacy. It places the child in the center of a wheel with all the support services and parenting as spokes and extended circles I want to talk today about bias Bias is a tendency often unconscious to favor or disfavor an idea a person or a group In transparency, my own bias is towards children's rights, child-centered thinking, and child-centered laws. A children's rights trauma-informed perspective reframes custody statutes as children's rights instruments, not just sources of parental entitlement. Laws should emphasize the child's needs, especially for the very young, as well as their voice and participatory rights. The child's schedule, especially the healthy dimensions of routine and stability. Developmental science, including age-specific needs, attachment, and each child's key milestones. And the long-term trauma impacts of forced contact with unsafe or unresponsive parents. Respectfully, House Bill 1499 fails that test. Child-centered thinking seems to be at the core of human experience. Adults have or should have an inherent responsibility to care for their young, making children the center of attention and respect as a societal or legal priority, likewise, should be the goal across family systems and governments. Yet, notwithstanding the ubiquitous best interest of the child standard and, in a sense, the unavoidable claim that everybody has to be a child advocate, children are often kept out of the equation of decision-making. That's happening here. With its presumption of 50-50 custodial time, House Bill 1499 presents itself as a child-centered bill. I'm just not so sure about that. Lead sponsor Representative Flick has observed this is not a bill about parents. He explained it's a bill about children, and children do best when both parents are part of their lives. Well, actually, Representative Flick has a good point. In many cases, children do well with both parents in their lives. Studies show there can be benefits of substantial time with both parents. However, we're invited here to ask a more specific question. Does every child do best when both parents are part of their lives in equal measure and possibly without other meaningful limits? And I think not. Child-centered thinking places the child at the center, and so I want to ask, who is the custody schedule survey? Typical shared physical custody arrangements have the child moving back and forth. You've heard reference to this all morning. Between the parents' houses. In the language of the Act, primary equals majority of the time, partial equals less than the majority of time. A common scenario is the child at one parent for some or all school nights and the other for some or most weekends. Often the child moves back and forth several times during the week or every other week and on most weekends, each and every week. 50-50 arrangements generally maximize the number and frequency of moves. Folks often dismiss the problems inherent in these shared time experiences. We say, my child needs more time with me. Or it's okay, moving back and forth doesn't really bother her. She's got her own room in each house. Being more candid, I'd observe 50-50 primarily asks the child to do a lot of moving. I'll skip my paragraph about nesting as a model, but I think it's a good study. What happens when we minimize the child's moving, we improve the child's continuity of sleep, their routines, and their school prep. We increase attachment for preschool and early childhood. We reduce the child stress and backpack Custodial schedules built on more of what the parents want than what works for the child I spoken to hundreds of children and young people about the experience of visitation, both in domestic relations and in child welfare experiences, where you're also sharing time in one way or other. Almost always kids are reluctant to criticize the arrangement. They tolerate the constant changes, the loss of personal space, the restrictions inevitably placed on friend relationships and school activities. They often respect the desire of their parent to have parenting time. But do they like all the moving? My experience says not so much. House Bill 1499 sets a presumption of 50-50 physical custody or equal parenting time. We all know intuitively how presumptions work. They create their own bias. They always do. That's the point. They lean one way on purpose. Generally speaking, presumptions change the starting point. They tip the scale. But they do so without any facts. Here, the presumption starts with one fact. This parent is the parent. And because he or she is the parent, the statute would establish they're entitled to time. tellingly that presumptive mechanism proceeds with no facts about the child except if somebody tries to bring them forward. No facts about the relationship of either parent to the child, nor about their ability to parent or to co-parent. If a party can demonstrate by their litigation, by their experts, by their lawyering, and then by the high bar of clear and convincing evidence that at different schedules needing, then the court might move back from the presumptive starting point. That just seems backward. A child-centered approach begins by asking, what does this child need? I offer you three reality checks. First, parent as stranger. Very common scenario. The child has no relationship with a parent who's been absent for some number of months or even years. With the mere filing of a petition, that parent, possibly a virtual stranger to the child, gets presumptive 50-50 access with overnights with the other parent left to take on the fight. That's pretty scary. Second, the household with unreported violence, with the unfortunate frequency of intimate partner violence, and assisted by compelling studies of adverse child experiences, or ACEs, we're just beginning to understand the consequent impact on the child witness who may also be an actual victim. Presumptive custody orders run past these details with dangerous speed. If harmed or threatened with harm, the child should be heard, protected, and not forced to return to or relive that harm. Finally, child support obligations are calculated based on custodial time, specifically the number of overnights a child stays with one or other parent as set forth in the court order. Practitioners know this. Parents manipulate. Child support is another child-focused element meant to meet the child's needs. The law should take care to avoid rather than encourage manipulation of support obligations that are masquerading as custody petitions. We've heard about context-sensitive individualized practice, and so I want to echo all of those. The mechanism of the so-called what was 16 factors is now 11 factors and so on. The mechanism is well regarded by most practitioners and jurists. It has stood the test of time. significant latitude in determining which factors deserve emphasis. There's no indication that courts are failing to comply with the law, which, as you've heard repeatedly, requires explicit on-the-record findings. People are different, and one size doesn't fit all. The promotants call House Bill 1499, and I'm wrapping up, a child's rights bill. This bill is on its face gender neutral. but the literature and the advocacy of this movement both tell us that it's really a father's rights bill in disguise. And I don't mean to highlight this as a bad thing. Generally speaking, should fathers have more time? Mostly. The evolving context and changing roles where fathers are to be more involved in their children's lives is one with which we can all be comfortable. Have courts been historically biased in favor of mothers? Sure. at least it used to be the case, query whether that's still true, the statute now explicitly bars custodial presumptions. I'd push back on this notion that's often stated that judges always favor mothers. I believe a fair majority of practitioners would agree. Certainly family economics and societal norms are way more diverse than they have ever been, making one or more outcome less dominant. We should be candid, most important that family strife, family violence, trauma history, economic disparity complicate many, if not most, custody cases. That stuff is hard to bring into the courtroom. Who suffers then? The child rarely has any voice or power. The law should remain focused on keeping the child as the center of attention and the center of analysis. House Article 1499 fails to do so. Thank you.

You do.

I will try to cut as I go. Thank you for the invitation to testify this morning. My name is Lila Slovak, and I'm speaking on behalf of the Women's Law Project. We are a Pennsylvania-based legal advocacy organization working on behalf of people across the Commonwealth to advance the rights of women, girls, and LGBTQ people and their families. I am here today to oppose House Bill 1499. Our position is informed by more than five decades of working directly with thousands of survivors, advocates, and families navigating Pennsylvania's family law system. Through our intake line, the Women's Law Project receives frequent calls from individuals all across the Commonwealth seeking help with custody, divorce, and interpersonal violence, most of whom cannot afford legal representation. HB 1499, as you've heard, would impose a misguided conception of gender equality at the expense of the safety and well-being of children and victims of abuse. Pennsylvania's current custody law requires courts to determine the best interest of the child with specific factors, and HB 1499 would replace this individualized, safety-focused approach with a dangerous 50-50 shortcut. The irony of this proposed change with long-standing best practice is that it would introduce further harm to children who are already experiencing high-conflict parental separation. As we've heard from my colleague, only the most high-conflict cases are the ones coming into court. Parents are free to work out whatever custody solutions they want outside of court And having a 50 presumption is not going to magically make those conflicts just disappear If so those parents wouldn even need to come to court when those presumptions exist It is the cases that are coming to court that require intervention because parents cannot agree, and those cases are most likely to involve serious conflict, including violence and abuse, and the 50-50 presumption is particularly ill-suited for those cases. At all times, especially in these high-conflict cases, children's safety and stability should be the driving judicial inquiry. Protecting parents and children navigating family court from abuse and violence is a critical part of our work at the Women's Law Project. Through our helpline and referral services, we hear firsthand from families across the Commonwealth what they are facing. We receive requests for help from hundreds of people each year, and many of those cases specifically relate to custody. In many of those cases, the caller discloses domestic or sexual violence, and that's only among callers who feel comfortable sharing those facts with us. I'm not going to share particular names or cases, but can share through some anonymized anecdotes, recent calls that we've heard. We've heard from callers about children who disclose that during forensic interviews they witnessed horrific abuse against their mother while going through custody and divorce proceedings. Victims who, when they tried to leave abusive marriages or relationships, received threats from abusers threatening to take full custody of their children if they left the relationship. Parents who, after leaving abusive relationships, continued to receive threats and experienced stalking from their abusers, and who feared that a court-ordered 50-50 custody arrangement would mean never seeing their children again because of the danger they would be placed in trying to see their children. I personally stood beside a mother in custody court who still had on her neck finger-shaped bruises from an encounter during the last custody exchange with the father of her child, and as her attorney, I supported her while a custody master just referred to the case as another he-said-she-said and ordered joint custody. Parents should never have to put their own lives at risk just to see our children, and our custody laws should not endorse such a system. While supporters of HB 1499 argue that evidence of domestic violence can be rebut with the 50-50 presumption, this argument overlooks the significant barriers that survivors face inside and outside of court. There is an entire field of study dedicated to understanding perpetrator tactics, cycles of abuse, why victims are often trapped in violent relationships, and again and again we see that victims who report abuse are not believed. They continue to be dismissed and blamed for the harm that they experience. One really remarkable study I'd urge you to take a look at and is referenced in our written comments, a study of national cases found that when a mother in custody court alleges abuse, she is actually more likely to lose custody. The rates even increase further if she alleges that her child was abused, particularly if a father is alleging alienation in those circumstances. So the idea that a victim of abuse can just rebut the presumption is not what we see happening in the real world. In addition to the barriers that survivors of domestic violence would face in rebutting the presumption we have observed at the Women Law Project an increase in perpetrators of violence using the legal system as a tactic of abuse Perpetrators are increasingly threatening or filing defamation suits when survivors speak out or seek help. They are cross-filing protection from abuse orders to distract and confuse the court. And they are suing survivors' attorneys to drive up costs and undermine their access to counsel, and we've even seen this in custody court. perpetrators of abuse suing petitioners' custody counsel and custody counsel sometimes backing away from the cases. HB 1499 would provide perpetrators with yet another tool that they could use to undermine and manipulate control, exert control over victims. No parent wants to gamble with their child's safety or well-being, and a difficult-to-rebut 50-50 presumption could be wielded as leverage to discourage survivors from seeking custody court intervention and relief. We know custody disputes are difficult for any parent, and we do not question the sincerity of parents who want more time with their children, but this cookie-cutter statutory presumption is not the right answer and is potentially a dangerous one. We urge you to keep the individualized best interest of the child analysis the Pennsylvania law currently requires and not replace it with a state-mandated one-size-fits-all approach. Thank you very much.

Thanks. Very quickly, Ms. Komar, you mentioned that some parents seek 50-50 custody to reduce child support. Would it be also true that some parents seek 50-50 custody to increase child support?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. It is quick. Ms. Slovak, on page three of your testimony, you speak and referenced a study by a Joan Meyer. That particular study you said shows that individuals who claim abuse are more likely to not receive custody of their child. That study, is that a national study? Is it a Pennsylvania study? Because I think that particular data, knowing if it's US-wide or Pennsylvania-specific,

It's a national 10-year retrospective study.

It would be a great study to fund. I'm not aware of one that's been done in Pennsylvania alone.

Yeah, I'd only add that Professor Meyer's study is widely regarded as kind of the gold standard in our work. There's not much data out there for all the reasons we suggested that people have been suggesting. Representative Kuzma, you know, mentioned a study that I'm really curious about, but with all due respect feels really shaky because of how hard it is to get the answer to the question, right? The data set is tremendously complex, right? as somebody said, there's multiple parties, there's multiple outcomes. Now that we have AI, we might someday get a better answer to the question. But it's really, really hard. All we have are the practitioners' accounts. Obviously, there's the experience of folks who are living it, and the room tells you what the experience of a lot of people is. That they feel abused. People feel abused in the work. It's why Judge Clifford kept coming back, And it's why this legislature kept coming back to a factorial analysis. It objectified something that used to be very armchair, very cultural, and very local. Thank you very much.

We're trying to get the panel.

I have bunches of questions. But one thing that I wanted to ask this panel in particular was something that was brought up in Judge Tuhill's written testimony, which is the idea that there's a shift in a burden of proof with the presumption and that the presumption requires clear and convincing evidence of any of the negative factors, abuse, drug use, what have you. and that that's actually a higher burden than the final burden in the custody proceeding. And I want to ask any of you who could focus on that. And like I said, I have a bunch of other questions as well. But that was one of the ones that struck me as an attorney.

Okay.

Thank you. Thank you very much. And thank you all for joining us. And Ms. Komar, I joined with you in a number of meetings to discuss that I had with Representative Flick. And I do hope as we move forward, we'll continue those conversations. And we definitely need the BAR's involvement to help us move forward. So thank you for continuing that. Thank you very much. Thank you all. So the third panel, if they can start approaching the table, we are happy to have Kelsey Messini, the legal policy manager from the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence, Catherine Sherlock, founder and CEO of Cadence Corner Foundation, as well as Daniel Pollack, the policy manager for National Family Violence Law Center. I will, since you sat down first, do we have the other two? Oh, Catherine. And is Danielle here? Oh, Danielle. Okay, great. Sorry. It's been a while. So we'll start with Ms. Messini, and then Danielle can sit in the middle. And thank you for joining us. Caden mom It says Catherine but is it Cathy Kathy thank you very much So we start with Ms Messini Danielle and Ms Sherlock You can begin. Thank you.

and Act 11 passed last year. Most importantly, those bills specified that substantial weight should be given to factors that affect the safety of the child. House Bill 1499 would eliminate that substantial weight consideration. With Cadence Law in Act 11, the General Assembly rightfully confirmed that increased weight and importance should be given to factors involving safety. These factors consider both abuse towards the child, abuse towards the other parent or household member, and other assaulted behaviors. Those changes were based upon recognition of the tragedy and harm that can occur when a court does not adequately consider abuse and safety. Abuse in the home even if a parent has not directly physically harmed the child has been shown to have significant adverse effects on a child mental emotional and physical development HB 1499 would impose a much lower standard regarding safety and instead would prioritize equal time with the parents over the safety of the child and the child's well-being. Equal custody time would also increase safety risks to survivors who leave an abusive relationship, as it would require more frequent custody exchanges and interactions with abusive parties. The unfortunate reality is that there have been instances in Pennsylvania where custody exchanges have turned deadly. If this bill passes, domestic violence victims may unfortunately choose to stay in abusive relationships. They may ultimately believe that staying will allow them to protect their children more than a custody system that does not prioritize their safety. This certainly would not be in the best interest of those children. Child custody is always a challenging issue, especially when courts are involved. Judges and legislatures are human, and as such, no law or decision is perfect. But unfortunately, this bill is not an example of an improvement. Indeed, it would be a significant step back. It would disregard the central focus of the child custody statute, which is the child. It would erase significant work to protect domestic violence victims that was done in enacting Caden's Law and the recognition of the importance in giving substantial weight to factors that affect the safety of the child and the parties. Instead, this bill would permit abusers to manipulate the system and control their victims to an even greater extent. I respectfully urge the honorable members of this committee to vote against the bill.

Thank you. Thank you, Chairman and members. Is this on? Yeah. Pull it a little bit closer. Okay. Thank you, Chairman and members, for inviting my testimony on HB 1499. I have serious concerns about this legislation, which obviously proposes a shared parenting presumption for Pennsylvania families and I would recommend a no vote on it. While at first glance this proposal may appear to simply be encouraging more parity between parents litigating child custody, it in fact undercuts important protections for children, reduces judicial discretion, and overall is not in children's best interest as many testifying today have spoken about. This proposal is of particular concern where family violence is present in a litigated case, and family violence is alleged in approximately 75% of litigated custody cases, so the majority. And also, importantly, we know from research that family violence exceptions in shared parenting presumption laws are ineffective, and I'll talk a little bit about that in a moment. By way of introduction, I am the policy manager at the National Family Violence Law Center at GW Law, which is the leading national research center providing select impact litigation, research, and policy guidance to Congress and states for evidence-based family violence prevention and child safety policies for family law, especially private custody litigation, which this bill is referring to. And for the question from the member earlier regarding the national study that comes out of our center, Professor Joan Meyer and I are close collaborators. And if you want the Pennsylvania-specific data from that national study, we're happy to pull that state-specific data for you. Included in our body of work is providing development and technical assistance for Cadence Law both the federal and the state versions including that which was adopted here in Pennsylvania and which grew out of Pennsylvania and became a national and international way to reform child custody law to improve protections for children Internationally, in 2023, Cadence Law was cited by the United Nations Special Rapporteur Against Violence Against Women and Girls as a model good practice law to the UN Human Rights Commission, to all member countries, and currently other countries, including England and Canada, are relying on Cadence Law as a model for their child safety reforms. So that started here in Pennsylvania. You should be proud of that. um this body of course adopted pennsylvania sb 55 cadence law with strong bipartisan support and of course it was signed into law by the governor in 2024 to improve protections for children who are at risk of abuse and subject to custody litigation we hear practically every week from protective parents how cadence law is helping them keep their children safe from abuse amid custody litigation. Kathy just got a text a few days ago saying Caden's Law saved my child's life. So it is making an impact for families that are impacted by family violence. The proposed legislation before us, HB 1499, would undo all of those protections for children and families that were advanced in that multi-year and bipartisan process. It would entirely erase the child's best interest factors, although if there's an amendment and it put it back in, it would still sublimate the best interest factors under that presumption, which is very problematic. And it would discard the safety measures that you all just recently put in place here in both chambers. To frame the problem that HB 1499 presents, one must really consider the essential goal of custody decision is to ensure that the best interests of the child, not the parents, are protected. Children are vulnerable. HB 1499 is contrary to common-sense, evidence-based child protection policies. It is not in their best interest to have a one-size-fits-all approach. Each family and each child is unique and has unique needs, and frankly, it would be absurd to do away with the best interest factors. presumptions as the judge clifford and others have talked about in child custody law are widely considered to be restrictive and contrary to determining a child's best interest unless they concern child safety obviously it's not a child's best interest to be with an abuser it's really important to to think about this in practical terms for example you don't want a cookie cutter approach that 50-50 is best because each child needs something unique. It's not, you know, in the best interest of a nursing infant, they have different interests than a teenager who can drive, right? The best interest of a child who has never known or lived with one parent can be quite different than those of a child who spent considerable time and is bonded with both parents. A child's best interests are not served by spending half their time automatically with someone who has a severe substance issue, and especially when the other parent is fit and has historically provided nearly all the caretaking, and so on. So we need those best interest factors and we need the judges to have discretion. Only individual assessments can really do this correctly. HB 1499 would instead impose a the one-size-fits-all model. And it would be a very cudgel-like approach to assert that a presumption of equal or near equal time with each parent is the preeminent determinant in a child's best interest. That position is not empirically supported. It's just not. We know from research, medical research, social science research, it shows that children's post-divorce well-being is not dependent on the frequency with which they see both parents, but rather upon two things. One, the extent to which the custody agreement reflects the pre-divorce caretaking and parenting time and caregiving, and two, the quality of parenting. So if someone's a great parent and both parents are great parents, great. If they both did a lot of the caregiving beforehand, great. Keep that consistent for the child. That's what makes the child thrive. If someone is an abusive parent, obviously we do not want them to be with that parent. That can create a lot of harms. There's examples, and I'm mindful of time, but I just want to point out there are some examples of failed shared parenting presumptions because some places have adopted this presumption. We can look to other states and nations, especially it's problematic, obviously, for those experiencing family violence. In 2000, Wisconsin adopted a 50-50 presumption model similar to that being proposed here in HB 1499. And the outcome there, they did a study on how well it was working, is that children were regularly placed in 50% custody of a parent who had been criminally convicted of perpetrating family violence. So not just alleged, criminally convicted. And we have the data for that if people are interested. It's cited in my testimony. So people say, well, there's a DV exception in this bill. It does not. They are not effective. We know this. Further, in 2023, Australia abolished their presumption of equal shared parenting responsibility, which had been in place since 2006 because it was showing that so many kids were getting hurt and getting ordered to abusers. The Australian abolish reform movement was widely supported by family violence experts and legal aid organizations across the country, including the Federation of Community Legal Centers, because they were seeing how harmful this was. Of course, as others have mentioned, Pennsylvania law already allows courts to award equal parenting time and is gender neutral. It's right in the law. You cannot discriminate based on gender. Of course, we did, you know, historically, under the tender years doctrine, many decades ago, courts generally defaulted to granting mothers primary custody, especially for the young children, tender years. However, that has not been the case for several decades in family law. On the contrary, in contemporary times, several studies, and again they're cited here, show that mothers are held to a significantly higher standard than fathers when being assessed by courts on their fitness to parent, especially in cases where abuse is alleged. And finally, Pennsylvania courts already have the full authority to order parents to have equal shared parenting time. In fact, judges do this all the time every day. That is to say, parents already come into the courtroom with equal rights. They do not come in with the scale tipped They enter the courtroom presumed to be you know equally fit and then they move through the best interest factors to understand the reality of the family The rights of parents should really never outweigh the protection of best interests of children As it stands courts err too often on the side of shared custody arrangements over child safety, sometimes resulting in preventable and ongoing child abuse, which is really horrific. I hear, you know, from a lot of families around the country that have situation, and sometimes they can result in fatality, such as was the case for Caden Mancuso. You will obviously hear a little bit more about this case from Caden's mom today, but in sum, a Bucks County family court in 2018 ordered shared parenting for seven-year-old Caden, who was then brutally murdered by her father following the court ordering unsupervised parenting time for him in an effort to be fair to both parents. And this happened despite her mom Kathy's warnings and the father's significant history of violent and erratic behavior, including a criminal record. So we feel that courts already sort of lean towards shared parenting as much as they can and over. In closing, the rebuttable shared parenting presumption model proposed here by HB 1499 would further prioritize the demands of litigating and sometimes abuse of adults rather than the needs of children. HB 1499 is a regressive encounter to the best interest of children in Pennsylvania, and I therefore encourage a no vote on this piece of legislation. I'm happy to take questions.

I talk really fast. No, no, no. We were here for you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's been a very long eight years. I'm not a crier, so I'm going to try really hard to get through this. In 10 days, Caden will be turning 16. She's been gone for almost over eight years now. Okay. Oh, God. Good doing. Good doing. I look around this room and I look at him like, why am I the most hated woman in this country for saying kids should be safe? I get my life threatened. They want to shoot me in the neck. They told me they were going to wood chip us. Brian hates my guts. He's been hated by guts from day one. I look around and they're my friends over there because I don't hate dads. I have a great father. I have a great husband. This man was a lunatic. I didn't have an abuse factor in my case, and I didn't have an alienation factor in my case. He was just mentally unstable. Okay? He was a nut. From the time he was born, he bit off a man's ear in a bar fight. If I bit off Danielle's ear in a bar fight, where would I be right now? In a rubber, I would be in a khaki jumpsuit with matching rubber shoes, and I wouldn't be getting out. I was sure as hell would not have custody of my children. Okay? It didn't even, we weren't even allowed to bring it up. They brought up that I had an underage drinking from the time I was 19 years old. When I went to get a, when I had to get a restraining order, I could have tried to kill my entire family on Thanksgiving. They laughed in my face and said, why didn't you report? I said, because he would have killed me, because he would have. that they deterred me from getting a restraining order the entire time. Her name was on the temporary one, and my lawyer that was assigned to me the other day whited it out. The judge just signed it and never knew anything. All it said was, please keep her safe until we can get back to Judge Trauger so he can finalize all the evaluations that I had to go through. I had to go through CCSS, $4,000, $6,000 for a mental health evaluation to tell you I had anxiety. Imagine that. And the AOPC says, well, they both were deemed to have problems. He was antisocial, narcissistic, suicidal, noted in the order amongst all of the other horrible, horrible things. The real narcissist. A narcissist is like the term of the decade but nobody really knows what it means okay He had no remorse He was banned from her school They never even told me They mandated reporters They never even reported it okay I tried to civilly sue 13 litigants in this case and I was unable to do so because my lawyer client inspector, and I will name them, dumped me two weeks prior to the statute of limitation. I took it on pro bono on myself, and I didn't do it because I ever thought I was going to win. I did it because it was to prove a point. If 13 people could fail in a case like my daughter, and she was number 647. We're up to 1,000 now. What does that say for the rest of us? Okay? So that's why we pushed so hard. I started, but never talked my entire life. I used to call out of high school, but speaking, and I started talking. I met Governor Wolf. This is how long this has been going on for. He was great. This is eight years. This has been a very long eight years to be hated around this country, to be told that I need to be wood chipped and fed to the fish from Kentucky, wherever Kentucky is. You guys are like the worst state in the country. Like you have the worst, highest domestic violence rate in the country, literally. And the 50-50 presumption, I don't know why it's working, probably because, I don't know. They don't know how to read. I don't know. So let's look at what Pennsylvania family law already provides. If you're a parent who does not have a history of safety risks, if you can cooperate, if you've been and you want to actively be in the child's life, you don't need a new law. You can already do that. Most people work this out on their own. You can sign off on a 50-50 agreement. We did that before we entered court. I was the defendant in my case. He just wanted to, every day, it was like a scene from my cousin Vinny. You're in contempt. You're in contempt. There was a freaking surprise. Why was I in contempt? Because a lunatic just said I was in contempt every single day of my life. He wanted me in jail. The police showed up at my house every single day trying to jail me. When I called to report Caden missing, the Philadelphia Police Department hung up on me. They did not issue an ambulance. Came home, Paul's Township, called him again, said, it's late. Take it up at the courts in the morning. She's with her father. My dad and husband found her dead the filing day in Philadelphia, okay? So same thing with the Decker case in Washington. They didn't do it. They don't issue Amber Alerts in this country because they cost so much money. That's what it comes down to. That's why they don't do it. Why do we have these laws? Why do we have Megan's Law and all these other laws? Some angry mom had to do this? Sorry, but this is not my idea of fun. I hate this. I'm sick of it. I get tortured on the Internet. If you've ever watched my Nightline, there's 10 million views and 9,000 million comments about how I didn't cry. I cried. ABC didn't hear it. You want the footage of me crying? Call them. But it's already there. I don't hate dads. This is not gender specific. This is literally, what I don't understand is if you're pushing for 50-50 and you're saying, this mom's an alienator, she's this, she's this, just why would you want that woman around your child for 50% of the time? Literally. I know that Cadent was killed over like $12 of child support. And I only knew that because I didn't know anything. I had to hire two attorneys to guide me through it because I'm a nurse by day or whatever else by other days. But I didn't know how to navigate the system. You couldn't find a lawyer in Ducks County for less than $500 an hour and a $10,000 retainer fee. Tell me how much you care about my kids, a $10,000 retaining fee. What have I done if I could have paid for my $6,000 unnecessary mental health evaluation that told me I had anxiety and was told to seek my primary to get something to sleep, which is compared to him. That's what they can read. They both had problems. I needed something because I could sleep. That man was ordered into mental health professions, and they never ordered it. Judge Strauger didn't even have to read it because there's nothing in this state that says that they have to read it. I'm pretty sure he made a paper airplane out of my thing, and his secretary wrote it. He might have probably wiped his butt with it. He didn't read it. He never read the evaluations, and he never read the things. This is a multibillion-dollar business in this country. It's a cottage industry. Why did I have to pay Dr. Weinstein for a $6,000 mental health eval when my insurance would have paid for it 100%? Handpicked. All these evaluators are handpicked. The only thing that changed in Bucks County now is the fact that everybody has to go to CCS now It not just before when they would just choose and they could have discretion They send everyone now It a pop And if it over 12 months old they make you redo it And they don't have to read it. They don't read it. So 50-50 is a great idea. If you were to get along with your parents, you wouldn't be in court. 3% of these people show up in court. There's some type of problem because whatever they've done has not worked. The police, whoever, you get there. I had lawyers prior to I showed up in court. We had an agreement. We signed. It wasn't good enough for him. He just continued to want this, this, this, that. Some people just shouldn't be around children or squirrels or anything. It just was the nature of him. I wasn't trying to take him from her. I had a father. I thought he was not around for five years. The man did not bother me for five years until he got off probation for the ear-biting case, which he was found guilty for aggravated assault. There's two cases in the state of Pennsylvania. A really good lawyer that I gave him. He was on house arrest for 14 months. December 15, I got my first letter from a lawyer suing me for 50-50 custody because he thought, literally, he thought if he got 50-50 custody, he wouldn't have to pay child support. I offered to drop it 7,000 million times, said here. And he would say, I'm not going to follow Dr. Friedman's orders unless you sign off on the rights and rear all infrigo child support. I told my lawyer, draw the papers, let's do it. He would take it back. It was the control tactic at that point. I just it just this is not we've already have to spend millions of dollars to be in court as it is okay 50-50 presumption is great you don't need to be here if you get along with each other you just don't I don't hate dads or men I actually don't like women I'm not going to lie about it but they're the ones that caused me all the trouble in the world that man over there right there I had great friends with him and fighting for his kid because, you know, it's ridiculous on every level. My sister and I have inspired women around the country to now just have children on their own because Prince Charming's not coming. And instead of sitting in custody battle, they just get donors. But what do they say about single moms? We have poverty. And I was like, I have a three-year-old niece. I was like, oh, Jordan, you're going to be a drug dealer because you don't have a dad. Families are different these days, okay? Same-sex has not hit this. You guys are not ready for that yet. Same-sex couples and all that. That is a weight thing. We're still stuck in the 50s when everyone thinks it needs to be a mom and a dad. No, you need to have adults. The opioid epidemic. Parents are dead. Who's raising these children? Grandparents, aunts, uncles, parents, this person, this person. It doesn't matter. They're all made up of different things. To sit there and say that you need a father in your life, maybe you do, maybe you don't. But if the father is abusive and bashes your head in with a dumbbell, you might not need him in your life. Same with moms. It goes both ways. It's just not a thing that we even need to be sitting here to discuss. 50-50 is not going to solve our problems. It's not world peace at the end. And I know people are angry. I'm very angry, too. I get it. Being angry sucks. Having to deal with these people. But you know what? I get called every name in the book. I was told, lay in the bed you slept with. Well, same to everybody else. Be careful who you have children with. Like, no offense. But that's how it is. This bill will just put us at way back. We did this for eight years. It took five years in Pennsylvania. You're going to undo it. I think one of the judges in here, a week after Caden's Law came out, had already had a bill to get rid of it. A week after Caden's log, and I'm not going to mention his name because he'll probably beat me up. I don't know where he is, but he's here. And I said it. Telling my story helped one person. It was worth it. I can't count the amount of people that has helped moms, dads. It does not matter. Dads, I'm going to court tomorrow to help dad in Bucks County. I help him in Luzerne County. I will help whoever comes to me if they're safe and normal. You know how many women I have told, drop support, see if he goes away. I cannot count how many women I have said that. They said how I say you go you say you drop it and the judge signs off of it and they sign their

this was, thank you very much. And thank you for sharing, sharing yourself to us. You know, this, this was probably the worst thing that could have ever happened to any, any of us. And for you to turn it into passion to protect other kids, it really is.

Are there any comments, questions for panel three?

So just closing before we go back to session I want to thank everyone for testifying today We heard testimony that raised significant concerns about HB 1499 as it currently written and the potential dangers of a presumption of equal physical custody. Everyone involved in our domestic relations system understands that there are legitimate concerns that deserve to be addressed. Our goal should be to make custody proceedings fairer, safer, and more responsive to the needs of the children. I don't think this bill does that, this bill will replace an individualized standard with a one-size-fits-all approach, and that is not in the best interest and safety of the children of Pennsylvania. In fact, after today's testimony, I fear this bill may actually do more harm than good. I will finish with one suggestion. I hope the people that support this bill will spend more time working on crafting a bill that brings all the relevant stakeholders together and less time ginning up support for a bill that will harm our children. As chairman of this committee, I will not advance a bill that puts the convenience of adults ahead of the best interest and safety of our children. Before I adjourn, I am going to go upstairs and hopefully we'll still be in session and announce a meeting for one o'clock in Irvis to consider bills. We sent the agenda out Monday, But I just, for everyone, all the voting members, 1 o'clock in Irvis, room 523. So hopefully I'll get that announcement before we go into recess. So today's meeting is adjourned. Thank you. Thank you.