Family Court judge allows email notice of petition seeking termination of parental rights for first time in New York

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In what apparently is the first such decision in New York state, an Onondaga County Family Court Judge has granted a request for email service of a petition seeking termination of parental rights.

“It’s a further expansion of email service in Family Court proceedings,” said James E. Corl Jr., law clerk for Judge Hon. Michael L. Hanuszczak, who issued the decision on Wednesday in the Matter of J.T.

Electronic service of legal papers has been allowed by the courts several times in the past, but not for a petition seeking termination of parental rights.

“This is the first that we could find in extensive research that we’ve done that actually allowed termination of parental rights petitions to be served via email,” Corl said.

The Onondaga County Department of Child and Family Services in April 2015 filed a neglect petition against the mother, and the child was taken from her.

According to the decision, the mother is an untreated Level 2 sex offender and the underlying previous findings of neglect had not been resolved.

The child’s father, who had been deported to Jordan, communicated by email with a caseworker and was aware of the neglect petition and application to remove the child from the mother and other court actions.

The caseworker knew that the father lived in the city of Madaba in Jordan, but had no address.

In July, the county filed a petition seeking to terminate the father’s parental rights because he did not maintain any meaningful communication with the child, whom he essentially abandoned. The attorneys for the child and for the mother joined in the county’s request to terminate the father’s rights.

The father is not represented by a lawyer in the case.

“At no time did the father provide any further information as to his physical address to the caseworker. The county has sufficiently demonstrated that it is impractical for personal service of process to be effectuated,” Hanuszczak wrote in his 3½-page decision.

Hanuszczak noted in the decision that the method of service “must be reasonably calculated to inform the respondent of the action and it is likely that the respondent will learn of the action.”

“The caseworker had multiple communications with the father through electronic means and none of the transmissions were returned as ‘undeliverable,’ ” he wrote.