Houston mother accused of abuse claims lifetime protective order violates her parental rights

After Houston mother Christine Stary was arrested in 2020 for beating her 9-year-old son, her ex-husband Brady Ethridge wanted to prevent Stary from seeing or directly contacting her three children them for at least two years.

During months-long protective order hearings, Ethridge testified about the March 2020 incident and several previous instances in which she said Stary beat the children, forced them to sleep outside on the porch and abandoned one of their daughters on the side. road during a drive back from Colorado.

The children called police for help at least six times, and Child Protective Services was contacted at least five times, according to court records.

After interviews with the children, a Harris County District Court judge took it a step further — she issued a lifetime protective order. Stary would not be allowed to see or contact her children indefinitely.

Stary’s parental rights haven’t been officially terminated — but she claims there’s no difference between that and a lifetime protective order. Now, she is asking the Texas Supreme Court to rule that the case must be reheard under a higher standard of proof.

“Termination of parental rights has been described as the death penalty in civil cases,” said attorney Eva Guzman, who argued for Stary on behalf of the Family Freedom Project on Tuesday. “And that description fits because what is at stake is the fundamental liberty interest in the care, custody, and control of our children.”

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

Court documents allege Stary grabbed the boy by the back of his head, slammed his face into the hardwood floor and carpet, then continued to beat his bruised face as his nose began to bleed. At the hospital, Ethridge said she saw her son with scratches, bruises, blood, dry scabs and nail marks on his skin.

Stary was arrested and charged with injury to a child, a third-degree felony, and issued the order of permanent protection until the end of the year. Stary was not notified that she would face a lifetime ban, her attorney said, and the court record did not indicate that either.

A court can issue a civil protection order that lasts more than two years if a judge finds evidence that a parent has committed an act that would constitute a crime – regardless of whether the person has been charged or convicted.

The main issue the High Court judges have to decide is how much evidence is needed to separate a parent like Stary from her children for life.

The issuance of a civil protection order lasting two years or more requires a “the preponderance of the evidence”, which means that something has been shown to be more likely to be true than not to be true. Termination of parental rights requires a higher burden of proof – courts must find 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 required a higher standard of proof to prove the order was necessary, his attorney said Stary, Holly Draper, Judges.

Draper also claims that Stary was not given a chance to properly defend himself against the domestic violence charges in court, and the evidence presented was not sufficient proof that domestic violence had occurred and was likely to occur in future.

“In a termination proceeding, that’s a completely different game than what happened here,” Draper said. “Typically those cases will take 12 to 18 months, you’ll do discovery, you’ll have an opportunity to fully defend yourself.”

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

The judges recognized the gravity of the permanent protective order against Stary. Judge Jimmy Blacklock said if given those options, he would rather go to prison for two or three years than be banned from his own children.

“We have all these elaborate doctrines of constitutional law that were developed to protect people’s liberty interests when they are at risk of being incarcerated for committing crimes,” Blacklock said. “And I wonder if, at the end of the day, what was done to this woman — whether she deserved it or not — is actually a lot worse than that and a bigger violation of 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.

While agreeing with Blacklock’s hypothesis, Bowen argued that Stary still retains some parental rights, including access to her children’s medical and school records. It allowed him two attempts to change the protection order. Therefore, he said it is not a final solution to terminate Stary’s parental rights, as her lawyers claim.

“I think the purpose of the protective order is to protect individuals, children, victims of domestic violence, a lot of people from their abuser in a short amount of time,” Bowen said.

Draper, Stary’s attorney, also argued that the law could be revised to require a judge to apply the higher evidentiary standard — and a felony conviction — when considering a protective order longer than two years . But the justices questioned whether that argument protects a parent’s rights over a child’s.

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

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

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