All over the country, we are creating systems of family law reform named after children who have died. Caden’s Law in Pennsylvania. Kaira’s Law in New York. California Piki’s Law. Grayson’s Law in Florida. Utah’s Om’s Law. Alec and Lydia Law of Arizona; Each exists because a mother tried to alert the system before her children were killed by their father.
Federal and state laws essentially ignore children because they do not enjoy a right to safety in this country. Although parents have a fundamental right under federal law and state constitutions to oversee the “custody, custody, and control” of their children, neither the federal constitution nor most state constitutional frameworks recognize a corresponding affirmative right to the safety of children during custody proceedings. And because the United States is the only United Nations member state that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, children in the United States lack basic human rights, including adequate legal protection and safeguards.
It’s no wonder, then, that children continue to die at the hands of their parents during custody battles. State law primarily considers children to be property and divides them 50/50, similar to how the equity in a marital home is divided. Judges routinely ignore mothers’ cries for help and objections to joint custody.
Tragedies resulting from court-ordered joint custody are not unforeseen. In more than 20 years of representing victims of domestic violence in family court, I have seen women enter court with police reports, medical records, credible threats, witness reports, psychiatric histories, photos, and text messages. Time and time again, they are treated as disabled persons in “co-parenting” rather than as reliable witnesses to danger.
The justice system often treats these murders as shocking, unpredictable anomalies, because recognizing foreseeability also requires acknowledging systemic failures. It is easier to say that the father’s violence came “out of nowhere” than to admit that the mother’s warnings could have changed the outcome.
In Arizona, Hope Hooton took just 15 minutes to argue before a judge finally granted her estranged husband unsupervised parenting time, despite documented mental health concerns and prior threats. In 2024, during court-ordered parenting time, Brock Meter murdered his children, 7-year-old Alec and 6-year-old Lydia, and then committed suicide.
Currently, Mr. Hooton is advocating the Alec Lydia method. The law would require judges to make written findings about patterns of domestic violence and give greater weight to police reports and medical records in detention decisions. This bill seeks to return the focus of family courts to their original jurisdiction of child safety.
Arizona is not unique in this regard.
Every time a child is murdered by the father during or after a custody battle, the grieving mother is forced to become a legislative advocate at some point. Each time, lawmakers draft another bill bearing the child’s name. Each time, we promise to learn from tragedy. And each time, the same organizational culture remains largely intact.
Family courts across the country routinely neglect co-parenting arrangements, even in cases involving coercive control, physical violence, suicidal or homicidal thoughts, or access to firearms. While judges are encouraged to preserve parent-child relationships at almost all costs, allegations of abuse are too often reframed as attempts to gain strategic advantage in custody cases. In my personal experience, mothers who express fear are sometimes assumed to be lying. In fact, mothers who allege abuse have a 70 percent chance of losing custody, even if the threats are later found to be genuine.
At the root of these decisions is a desire: the judge want Fathers are expected to be equal parents, and the fathers’ rights movement is lobbying hard to convince them that 50-50 custody should be the default. It is also much easier for a judge to enter a default judgment than to hold a trial. Across the country, judges are encouraging mothers (like Hooten) to settle for equal joint custody of even infants and toddlers, an arrangement that is the exact opposite of what child psychologists recommend.
But the warning signs of a dangerous father are painfully common. It’s a history of domestic violence. An obsession with control, be it physical, emotional, or financial. Threats of self-harm. Female murder and death threats. Increased instability. And finally, access to firearms. These are not details discovered later by chance. These are well-established risk factors for lethal violence. The problem is not that there are no warning signs. The problem is that we repeatedly fail to act on them.
This failure is structural. Although family law is one of the most important jobs in the legal system, it is often referred to as a “temporary court” because within the judicial system it is treated as a passing field rather than a specialty that judges aspire to. The job is emotionally demanding, politically unrewarding, and rarely prestigious. The judges assigned there had little experience in family law, and the judge in Alec and Lydia’s case was a former state attorney general. They have no specialized training in domestic violence, coercive control, trauma, child psychology, or lethal assessment. This is true even though women and children are responsible for deciding whether to live or die.
We will never appoint untrained judges to oversee complex patent litigation or multibillion-dollar securities disputes and dismiss fatal mistakes as inevitable. Yet we routinely ask judges with minimal specialized training to make swift decisions that risk the lives and deaths of women and children.
What is needed is not just another law named after another deceased child, but many of those laws would be helpful. One important aspect of the Alec Lydia Act, which is still pending, is that judges are required to issue written findings when safety concerns are raised. What we need is a professionally staffed custody court. only It is by a judge who has received extensive training in domestic violence and child safety. And we need to reduce the size of the docket so that well-meaning judges can actually hear these cases.
But more importantly, we must change the mindset that children are property to be divided. It is time to give children a fundamental right to safety, based on state human rights laws and constitutions modeled on United Nations conventions. The language, rights, and policy priorities contained in state constitutions reflect the cultural values that state residents uphold and seek to protect. They indicate what a society considers important and legitimate. Over time, public attitudes can be shaped by legitimizing certain principles and incorporating them into the state’s legal and political framework. Therefore, enshrining the humanity of children in state constitutions is an important first step toward treating children as full human beings. A society that recognizes the humanity of children is less likely to overlook documented patterns of abuse and more likely to minimize threats to child safety as interpersonal and unpleasant “conflicts” between two equally situated parents.
We must also face the truth that our legal system continues to resist. Women who report abuse are often right. The mothers who enacted these laws were not irrational or conspiratorial. They weren’t trying to interfere with co-parenting. They were trying to keep their children alive.
Kayden. Kira. Piki. Grayson. ah. Alec and Lydia.
This list of horrific new legal traditions, named after the failure of family courts to protect children in the Parental Rights Reform Act, will continue to grow until the system changes.
Dale Margolin Cecka is an associate professor and director of the Domestic Violence Litigation Clinic at Albany Law School.
Recommended citation: Dale Margolin Cecka, State constitutions need to better protect childrenSᴛᴀᴛᴇ Cᴏᴜʀᴛ Rᴇᴘᴏʀᴛ (June 22, 2026), https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/state-constitutions-must-better-protect-children
