Minneapolis Family Law Blog

In Minnesota, when a couple gets a divorce, the spouse's parents may petition the court for visitation time with the grandchildren. This can be useful for grandparents in cases where the custodial parent is not allowing regular visits with the grandchildren.

Most other states have some form of grandparental visitation rights. But in general, members of children's extended families do not have similar legal opportunities. Children's great-grandparents, stepparents and others who may have a close relationship with the children pre-divorce may therefore lose contact with the child if the custodial parent chooses not to allow it.

In another rare application of Minnesota's provisions against polygamy, a Freeborn County man has been charged with being married to two women at the same time. Authorities say the man lied about his marital status when he claimed to unmarried before marrying his current wife.

We have discussed the legal ramifications of polygamy in Minnesota a few times in this blog, most recently in our Dec. 16 post. As in virtually every other state, it is illegal in Minnesota to be married to more than one person at the same time. Once a bigamous marriage is discovered, the second marriage is legally void, meaning that the state considers it never to have existed. That means that divorce is unnecessary in cases of bigamy, at least as far as the second marriage is concerned.

Among the bills being introduced in the just-underway 2012 Minnesota legislative session is a measure that would require family court judges to presume roughly equal custody for divorcing or unmarried parents. The bill, which is similar to proposed laws in other states, generally would grant each parent custody for at least 45.1 percent of the time. The bill is being sponsored by Rep. Peggy Scott, R-Andover.

We have discussed the movement to change the child custody laws in Minnesota in previous blog posts, most recently on Dec. 28. Proponents of the bill say that the current system, in which judges step in when the parents cannot work out an agreement, is biased toward mothers and that children are harmed by not spending equal time with their fathers.

Following a one-day trial, a six-person jury in Hastings, Minnesota, found a 60-year-old Lakeville man guilty of child neglect in connection with his leaving his 11-year-old son alone to travel to California. The man has not seen his son since he left on July 18, but he is fighting to regain custody of him. Neither his attorney nor the Dakota County prosecutor was certain of how the verdict in the criminal case would affect the civil child custody proceedings.

It took the jury took just 30 minutes of deliberation to find that the man, who was raising his son alone, violated the law when he slipped out of the house he shared with the boy on July 18 to track down some distant relatives for financial help. The man worked as an architect but due to the poor economy had trouble securing jobs.