For the first time since Lisa Miller disappeared with her daughter rather than transfer custody to her former partner due to her own refusal to abide by custody/visitation arrangement, a representative of Liberty Counsel has finally acknowledged her disappearance on the record:
Mathew Staver, Miller’s attorney from Lynchburg-based law firm Liberty Counsel, said neither he nor his office has had contact with Miller since last fall.
“We don’t know where she is and we don’t know anybody who does know her whereabouts,“ Staver said in a phone interview Tuesday.
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Staver said efforts are currently under way to track down Miller through a locator service.
Staver also said that arrest warrant issued for Miller in Vermont will not have jurisdiction in Virginia, Miller’s last known place of residence, unless it is recognized by a VA court, which just last week refused to hold Miller in contempt on the grounds that she had not been notified to appear in court due to the fact that nobody can find her.
Amazingly, even while this saga was unfolding, Liberty Counsel was waging the same fight in a similar case out of California … and losing:
In a case that reached the U.S. Supreme Court, a Bay Area woman has won the right to parental status and visits with the daughter of her former lesbian partner, who moved out when the girl was 3 months old.
The high court denied review Monday of an appeal by the birth mother, identified only as Kristina S., who challenged her former partner’s right to be considered a parent. Kristina’s lawyers, from the religious conservative group Liberty Counsel, argued that recognizing parental status after a few months of care violated a mother’s right to control her child’s upbringing.
The court left intact a June 2009 ruling by a state appeals court in San Francisco that said Kristina’s partner, identified as Charisma R., had been fully involved in conceiving and taking care of the child and was legally her co-parent.
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Liberty Counsel representatives were unavailable for comment. The group’s chairman, attorney Mathew Staver, told the Supreme Court that the California appellate court had “ordered the breakup of the autonomous, natural family comprised of Kristina and her daughter … in favor of a new, judicially created ‘family.’ “
