A Houston mother accused of abuse argues that the lifetime protective order violates her parental rights

After Houston mother Christine Stary was arrested in 2020 for beating her then-9-year-old son, her ex-husband Brady Ethridge wanted to prevent Stary from seeing or having direct contact with their three children for at least two years.

During several months of protective order hearings, Ethridge testified about the March 2020 incident and several previous cases in which he said Stary beat the children, forced them to sleep outside on the porch and left one of her daughters on the side of the road during a return trip from Colorado.

According to court documents, the children called police for help at least six times and Child Protective Services was contacted at least five times.

After interviewing the children, a Harris County District Court judge went one step further — issuing a lifetime protective order. Stary was not allowed to see or contact her children directly for an indefinite period of time.

Stary's parental rights have not been officially terminated – but she argues there is no difference between that and a lifetime protection order. Now she is asking the Texas Supreme Court to rule that the case must be retried under a higher standard of proof.

“Severance of parental rights has been described as a death penalty in civil cases,” said attorney Eva Guzman, who argued for Stary on Tuesday on behalf of the Family Freedom Project. “And this description fits because it is about the fundamental freedom interest in the care, custody and control of our children.”

Stary and Ethridge divorced in 2018 and agreed that their children – all minors at the time – would spend half their time with each parent. But in March 2020, her son was taken to the hospital after Houston police were called to Stary's home.

Court documents say Stary grabbed the boy by the back of the head, slammed his face into the hardwood floor and carpet, and then continued punching his injured face as his nose began to bleed. At the hospital, Ethridge said he saw his son with scratches, bruises, blood, dried scabs and fingernail marks on his skin.

Stary was arrested and charged with injury to a child, a third-degree felony, and placed under the permanent protective order until the end of the year. Stary was not informed that she was facing a lifetime restriction, her attorney said, and court records did not indicate this.

A trial court may issue a civil protection order that lasts longer than two years if a judge finds evidence that a parent committed an act that would constitute a crime, regardless of whether the person was charged or convicted.

The key question the Supreme Court justices must decide is how much evidence is needed to separate a parent like Stary from her children for life.

For the issuance of a civil protection order with a term of two years or longer, a “Preponderance of the evidence“, meaning that something has been proven to be true rather than not true. Termination of parental rights requires a higher burden of proof – the relevant courts must find the evidence.clear and convincing.”

Because the protective order is essentially a termination of Stary's parental rights, the trial court should have used a different legal process that requires a higher standard of proof to prove the order was necessary, said Stary's attorney, Holly Draper the judges.

Draper also argues that Stary was not given the opportunity to adequately defend herself in court against the domestic violence allegations and that the evidence presented was not sufficient proof that family violence had occurred and was likely to occur in the future.

“In a dismissal process, it’s a very different game than what happened here,” Draper said. “Typically such cases take 12 to 18 months, you will conduct the investigation and have the opportunity to mount a full defense.”

Stary was also not allowed to testify about her ex-husband's allegations of domestic violence.

The judges recognized the seriousness of the permanent protective order against Stary. Judge Jimmy Blacklock said if given that option he would rather go to prison for two or three years than be banned from coming near his own children.

“We have all these sophisticated doctrines of constitutional law designed to protect people's liberty interests when they are at risk of being incarcerated for committing crimes,” Blacklock said. “And I wonder whether what was done to this woman – whether she deserved it or not – is ultimately far worse and a greater intrusion on her freedom than a prison sentence would be.”

Marshall Bowen was the court-appointed attorney who defended the appeals court decision – Ethridge did not file a response to his ex-wife's appeal.

Although he agreed with Blacklock's hypothesis, Bowen argued that Stary still retained some parental rights, including access to her children's medical and educational records. She allowed two attempts to change the protection order. Therefore, he said that depriving Stary of her parental rights was not a way out, as her lawyers claim.

“I think the purpose of the protection order is to protect individuals, children, domestic violence victims and a whole range of people from their abuser in the short term,” Bowen said.

Draper, Stary's attorney, also argued that the law could be changed to require a judge to apply higher standards of evidence – and a felony conviction – when considering a protective order that lasts longer than two years. However, the justices questioned whether this argument protected the rights of a parent over the rights of a child.

It's a balancing act, Draper said, and there are other ways to protect children and other victims of domestic violence.

“A lifetime protection order is not necessary to protect children from immediate danger,” she said.

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