CINCINNATI (LN) — A Sixth Circuit panel on April 21 upheld a federal court's refusal to return a 13-year-old girl to Martinique, holding that the district court did not clearly err in finding the child sufficiently mature and genuinely opposed to repatriation.
The decision drew a pointed dissent accusing the majority of rubber-stamping a legally deficient record and skipping a stricter evidentiary standard that three sister circuits have applied when the age-and-maturity exception is the sole basis for denying return.
The case pits Ilyse and Legrand Deravil, the girl's grandaunt and granduncle who raised her in Martinique for eight years, against Julmise Jean and Johnny Jean-Louis, her birth parents, who brought her to Ohio for what was supposed to be a summer visit in 2023 and never sent her back. The Deravils filed a petition under the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, and the district court found they had established a prima facie case of wrongful retention — but denied the petition after interviewing the child, identified only as A.D., in camera.
In that closed-door session, A.D. told the district court she felt unsafe in Martinique, recalled Legrand hitting her with a stick and threatening another child with a machete, and said she felt she did not belong there. She also said she felt bad about being forced to return. The district court found those statements, corroborated by medical records, satisfied the age-and-maturity exception by a preponderance of the evidence.
Writing for the majority, Circuit Judge McKeague, joined by Circuit Judge Thapar, applied clear-error review and declined to second-guess the district court's firsthand assessment of A.D.'s demeanor and credibility. The majority quoted the circuit's own standard: to reverse for clear error, a mistake must "strike us as wrong with the force of a five-week-old, unrefrigerated dead fish."
The majority also rejected the Deravils' argument that the district court was required to apply a stricter standard referenced by the Second, Third, Eighth, and Tenth Circuits when the age-and-maturity exception serves as the sole basis for denying return. While acknowledging those circuits invoke such a standard, the majority found that none of them actually defines what it means — and that even when they invoke it, they still review factual findings for clear error. The majority declined to adopt or define the standard, calling it a question for another day.
Circuit Judge Griffin dissented at length, arguing the majority committed an error of law by skipping the stricter standard entirely and then compounded it by deferring to factual findings he said the record could not support. Griffin catalogued A.D.'s responses in the interview — contradicting herself on whether she took medication, answering questions about school with "Gym" twice in a row, saying she did not know what the case was about after initially claiming she did — and concluded she fundamentally lacked the maturity to follow or understand the questions the district court posed and the dispute over where she should reside.
Griffin also pressed hard on the influence question, noting A.D. had lived exclusively with the Jean-Louises for nearly two years of the interview, that she described the Deravils as people who stole her, and that her account of events closely tracked the Jean-Louises' own narrative. He argued the district court's leading questions — asking A.D. whether everything she was telling the court was her own words and not someone speaking through her — were precisely the kind of prompts an immature child would simply confirm.
On the particularized-objection prong, Griffin wrote that A.D.'s testimony amounted to a generalized preference for Ohio — she has her own bedroom, friends, and plays soccer — rather than a specific, consistent objection to returning to Martinique. He noted A.D. also said she has friends in Martinique and played soccer there too, and that when the district court pressed her to explain why she did not want to return, she said only that she did not like the Deravils and then answered "no" when asked to elaborate.
The majority acknowledged that exchange directly, noting that on its face the answer does not seem like a particularized objection — but held the district court was entitled to read additional meaning into A.D.'s earlier statements about feeling unsafe and not belonging in Martinique.
Griffin said he would reverse and remand with instructions to grant the Deravils' return petition. A.D. had been wrongfully retained for nearly two years the district court interviewed her, he wrote, and without a stricter standard, the wrongful retention itself can produce the purported maturity evidence that defeats the petition, rewarding the abducting parent and undermining the Hague Convention's core purpose.
The majority's decision leaves unresolved whether the Sixth Circuit will ever formally adopt — and define — the stricter standard that three sister circuits have invoked but none has reduced to a concrete test.