Background
After C.V.’s birth, the Pueblo County Department of Human Services filed a dependency-or-neglect petition based on concerns arising from the death of the parents’ other child a year earlier, including alleged signs of physical abuse and medical neglect. Father, T.V., was incarcerated on related pending charges. The juvenile court placed C.V. temporarily with maternal grandmother under Department supervision and permitted mother to live there with only supervised contact.
Before any adjudication, the court approved a Department-proposed treatment plan for father. At a later review hearing, mother made a no-fault admission and agreed to an allocation of parental responsibilities between herself and maternal grandmother. Father was absent because the jail did not honor a writ; his counsel asked for time to consult him and object, and the court ordered a fourteen-day objection period.
Five weeks later, the Department submitted a proposed order stating that father had failed to comply with a treatment plan entered following adjudication, that reasonable efforts had failed to rehabilitate him, and that he was unfit. Four days later, without another hearing or the promised opportunity to object, the court adopted that order.
The Court’s Holding
The Colorado Court of Appeals held that the juvenile court violated father’s due-process rights by finding him unfit and finding that reasonable efforts had failed to rehabilitate him without notice and a meaningful opportunity to be heard. Father had no meaningful opportunity to object because the challenged findings first appeared in the proposed order, which the court adopted four days later.
The court also held that the juvenile court lacked authority to impose a treatment plan on father before adjudicating C.V. dependent or neglected as to him. Thus, it erred in finding that father had not complied with that plan. Father was prejudiced because an erroneous unfitness finding deprives him of the constitutional presumption that a fit parent acts in the child’s best interests.
The court ordered the juvenile court to strike the findings concerning father’s unfitness, rehabilitation, and noncompliance with treatment and monitoring. It otherwise affirmed the allocation of parental responsibilities to mother and maternal grandmother. The court rejected father’s ineffective-assistance claims because he did not show that counsel’s alleged failures would have changed the APR outcome; any prejudice concerning the treatment plan and reasonable-efforts findings was cured by the partial reversal.
Key Takeaways
- A court must provide notice and a meaningful opportunity to be heard before making parental-unfitness findings in an APR proceeding.
- Absent an applicable exception, a juvenile court cannot order a parent to complete a treatment plan before an adjudication as to that parent.
- Incarceration or pending criminal charges alone cannot support a finding that a parent is unfit.
Why It Matters
The decision preserves the APR arrangement while requiring the removal of findings that could materially burden father’s future efforts to seek custody or parenting time. It underscores that dependency-and-neglect courts cannot use an APR order to make untested findings of unfitness or treatment-plan noncompliance against a nonadjudicated parent.