By Dennis Prater
District Court Judge, 36th District
This past Saturday, April 1, marked 18 years since I was sworn in as District Judge for Magoffin and Knott Counties. I truly love this job and love the people that I serve. However, I feel that we have been dealt a bad hand as it pertains to the upcoming changes to our court system.
The elimination of Family Court for the people of Magoffin and Knott County is a travesty. Our citizens are being forced to return to the “old system” of having their cases split between district and circuit court, doing away with the “one family, one court” model that they have been accustomed to for over 20 years.
To give those that are not too familiar with our current family court jurisdiction a little background, the Floyd, Knott and Magoffin Family Court was started as a pilot project in 2001. At the time, Floyd County did not have the case numbers to justify having their own stand-alone family court, so a deal was reached to combine the two jurisdictions to justify the position. Since that time, the Family Court Judge ran for office in Floyd County and was appointed to serve in the same capacity in Knott and Magoffin Counties. To date, no one from Magoffin or Knott County ever challenged the constitutionality of the pilot project and the fact that we did not have the ability to vote for the family court judge.
We merely continued to reap the benefits of the family court system in the fashion that it was given to us.
Fast forward to the fall of 2022 when Family Court Judge Dwight Stacy Marshall, who had just been elected to a new 8-year term, expressed his desire to no longer serve the people of Magoffin and Knott County and to remain solely in Floyd County. Rather than come up with a logical solution to this dilemma that would allow us to keep our family court, Kentucky Supreme Court Chief Justice John Minton issued an order on December 21, 2022, 10 days prior to his retirement, that eliminates family court for Magoffin and Knott Counties, effective April 30, 2023.
Now some may argue that other counties in our Commonwealth do not have a family court system, including counties in this area like Boyd, and Perry and Letcher, and they are faring just fine. But again, our citizens have been fortunate enough to benefit from the services that family court provides, our attorneys are accustomed to family court practice, our justice centers have been equipped with family courtrooms, and our court staff is fully trained and has been since 2001.
I bring up these points to show that we as a court system are fully capable of continuing to provide family court services to the people of our counties should the legislature and the supreme court intervene to provide us with our own family court judge. I want to extend a heartfelt thanks to our State Representative John Blanton who has been lobbying for such action with his colleagues since the order eliminating our family court was issued. I know he will continue to fight for us in the coming days and months.
Now make no mistake, the cases I inherit on May 1st will be given the utmost attention and I will try them to the best of my ability. But our area has been dealt several blows in recent history with flooding, job loss, pandemics and the like and it would be an absolute slap in the face to continue to take away from our families even more. I hope that the powers that be can find some common ground and come up with a solution that allows us to keep our family court system.
