Sep 10, 2004  |  By: ADRIAN BRUNE  | COMMENTS     

Janet Miller-Jenkins’ weekly pilgrimage for her visitation rights began in September 2003 by automobile — a loosely planned 10-hour, 500-mile quest from western Vermont to central Virginia to see her daughter.

The trips continued over the course of a year by plane, a routine flight from Albany, N.Y., to Baltimore-Washington International airport, where she would rent a car and drive to her former partner, Lisa Miller-Jenkins’ home in Frederick, Va.

After Lisa turned Janet away on her doorstep when Janet showed up for her court-ordered visitation, those trips included a regular stop at courthouses and sheriffs’ offices in both states to elicit a means of enforcing her parental privileges.

“I would show up, and she wouldn’t be home. I would leave, phone, and return two hours later to see her walk right past me, enter the house and lock the front door,” Miller-Jenkins said in a phone interview. “After this continued for weeks, I tried for a visitation escort from the sheriff’s deputies in Frederick, but they had passed that law [the newly enacted civil unions ban] and they could only turn me down.”

On Saturday, however, Janet Miller-Jenkins will make one more journey to Lisa Miller-Jenkins’ home in Frederick, this time armed with a Vermont judge’s final ruling that Lisa acted in contempt of a court order when she refused Janet’s regular interaction with Isabella.

Though Rutland Family Court Judge William D. Cohen temporarily withheld sanctions against Lisa Miller-Jenkins, if she does not comply with the Vermont order, she could face a stiff fine, jail time, or a reversal of custody, according to the ruling.

Cohen’s decision marks the most recent development in a highly contentious custody battle between two lesbians once united in a civil union that has drawn national attention over the questions it raises about states’ requirements to honor those unions.

At the center of the high stakes, interstate court-order game is a 2-year-old, blonde-haired toddler named Isabella, who was whisked away from her home in Vermont and forbidden to see a parent once intimately involved in her life.

In the Vermont judge’s sharply worded decision, he scolded Lisa Miller-Jenkins for seeking Vermont’s protections, then soliciting them elsewhere when the court decisions did not suit her.

He called on Lisa to comply with his June 17 order that awarded Janet Miller-Jenkins visitation rights as a non-custodial parent “regardless of what the Virginia court does,” until the chaotic situation “created by her own conduct” is resolved.

“Lisa chose to bring her action initially in Vermont because of the rights and benefits Vermont’s law provide her,” the judge wrote in his eight-page decision. “But when she realized that there were obligations and burdens to go along with those rights and benefits, and decided that under the specific order issued by the Vermont court the benefits were outweighed by the burdens, she changed her mind and decided to go elsewhere.”

No visitation expected
However, Cohen also wrote that he would reserve judgment on the matter of sanctions to give Lisa Miller-Jenkins a final chance. Attorneys for Janet Miller-Jenkins said they fully expected Lisa to again refuse Janet’s planned visitation on Saturday, after which they would immediately file a motion for sanctions after advising the court of Janet’s denied attempt.

“A Vermont judge has found that Lisa’s contemptuous conduct violates a lawful order, and that evinces an attitude that is not in the best interest of the child,” said Theodore Tarisi, Janet Miller-Jenkins’ Vermont attorney. “The judge has bent over backward for Lisa Miller-Jenkins, and he could cure this contempt by finding that Lisa is not an appropriate custodian because she cannot foster a positive relationship.”

Attorney Judy Barone, who represents Lisa Miller-Jenkins in the Vermont proceeding, refused comment, saying she has “given the public sufficient information about the law as we see it.” She told the Rutland Herald, however, that she is considering an appeal of Cohen’s visitation order.

“I think we have confusion between two states ordering two different things,” Barone said. “Obviously, this will have to be decided by some higher court to reconcile the two courts.”

Still, family law experts and constitutional scholars emphasized that enforcing a contempt motion could prove problematic, especially since Lisa Miller-Jenkins lives in Virginia.

“If she is ...