The Credibility Gate: What Kyra’s Law Actually Does — and the Provision Nobody Is Covering
By Michael Phillips | Father & Co.
A decade after a Long Island toddler was shot to death by her father during a court-ordered, unsupervised visit, the bill bearing her name has finally cleared the New York Legislature. Kyra’s Law — A.6194-C (Hevesi) / S.5998 (Skoufis) — passed both chambers on June 5 and was delivered to Governor Kathy Hochul on June 15. She has until the end of the year to sign it, veto it, or negotiate changes.
Most of the coverage so far has told one of two stories. The advocacy story: a mother’s ten-year fight to make child safety the threshold question in custody cases, finally vindicated. The skeptics’ story, mostly whispered rather than published: another allegation-driven statute that will be weaponized in litigation against parents — disproportionately fathers — who have done nothing wrong.
Both stories are incomplete, because both skip the bill’s actual mechanics. Read the text, and Kyra’s Law turns out to be something more interesting than either narrative: a statute whose entire real-world effect will ride on a single hinge — how rigorously judges apply its credibility threshold — and which quietly contains the most significant due process reform for restricted parents in a generation of New York family law.
This publication covers family courts for all parents. So let’s do what we do: read the receipts.
What Happened to Kyra Franchetti
In July 2016, two-year-old Kyra Franchetti was on an unsupervised, court-ordered visit with her father when he shot her twice in the back while she slept, set his house on fire, and killed himself. Her parents were in an active custody dispute. According to the legislative record, the court had ordered unsupervised visitation despite repeated reports and eyewitness accounts of the father’s rage issues, suicidal ideation, stalking, and a history of coercive tactics.
Kyra’s mother, Jacqueline Franchetti, had pleaded with the court for protective measures over two years of hearings. She has said the judge told her the case was not a life-or-death matter. The judge was wrong.
The pattern is not that courts lacked information. It is that courts had the information and discounted it.
Franchetti spent the next decade rewriting and re-lobbying the bill that became Kyra’s Law. By the advocacy group Kyra’s Champions’ count, at least 38 children in New York have been killed by a parent during an active divorce, separation, or custody case since 2016. The pattern in the worst of these cases — including 8-year-old Thomas Valva, who froze to death in his father’s garage after his mother’s warnings to the court went unheeded — is not that courts lacked information. It is that courts had the information and discounted it.
That is the failure Kyra’s Law targets. Whether it hits that target without creating a new one is the question this piece takes seriously.
What the Bill Actually Does
Kyra’s Law amends Domestic Relations Law § 240 and Family Court Act § 651, along with the appellate provisions of the Family Court Act and CPLR. Five mechanics matter.
1. The threshold hearing. When any party to a custody or visitation proceeding — or the attorney for the child — asserts facially credible allegations that, if true, would pose a substantial risk to the child’s safety, the court must conduct a prompt evidentiary hearing to determine whether temporary limitations on custody or visitation are necessary. The court’s determination must be in writing or on the record.
2. The rebuttable presumption. A party the court finds to pose a substantial risk to the child’s safety is presumptively barred from unsupervised custody or visitation — at both the temporary and final order stage. The presumption is rebuttable, but it flips the default.
The presumption is rebuttable, but it flips the default.
3. The friendly-parent neutralizer. Where credible allegations are raised, the court may not treat a parent’s protective behaviors — the gatekeeping conduct that courts have historically read as “failure to foster the relationship” with the other parent — as evidence against that parent.
4. The risk-factor checklist. Courts must review histories of domestic violence and child abuse and a specified set of risk factors: stalking, violence during pregnancy, unlawful dissemination of intimate images, recent patterns of abuse, threats to harm or kill, and coercive control. Courts must also appoint an attorney for the child whenever credible allegations of substantial risk are made.
5. Judicial training. Judges hearing custody matters must receive specific training in domestic violence, child abuse, and child sexual abuse.
A companion bill (A.65-B, also Hevesi) establishes a statewide supervised visitation initiative through the Office of Children and Family Services. Per the Assembly’s own press materials, more than half of New York’s counties currently have no supervised visitation program at all — which means that today, a judge who wants to order supervised contact often has no practical way to make it happen, and defaults to unsupervised access or none.
The Fear, Stated Plainly
Now the concern that readers of this publication will raise, and that deserves a straight answer rather than a dismissal: does a statute that front-loads allegations create an incentive to allege?
Structurally, yes. Any framework in which a credible-allegation finding reshapes the case before other factors are weighed raises the strategic value of making an allegation early. We have documented at length in these pages how the machinery of family litigation — protective orders, evaluations, supervised-contact regimes — can be turned into instruments of the same coercive control it exists to prevent. That risk does not disappear because a statute is well-intentioned. The temporary-order stage is where it bites hardest: temporary orders create the status quo, courts are institutionally reluctant to disturb the status quo, and a parent restricted at month one may spend a year litigating back to where they started.
The fear is not paranoid. It is structural.
The friendly-parent neutralizer sharpens the concern. Once an allegation is in play, a parent’s gatekeeping conduct is insulated from the adverse inference it would otherwise carry. That provision exists for a real reason — protective parents, mothers and fathers alike, have been punished as “alienators” for raising documented safety concerns — but it also immunizes conduct that, in a bad-faith case, looks identical.
So the fear is not paranoid. It is structural. The question is whether the bill’s own safeguards answer it.
The Safeguards, Stated Just as Plainly
Child safety and due process are not opposites. Accountability requires both.
Three things distinguish Kyra’s Law from the caricature.
First, the drafting history. This bill was rewritten roughly ten times over a decade, and the false-allegation problem was not ignored — it was the reason earlier versions stalled. Legislative negotiations repeatedly hung up on language that stakeholders feared could greenlight hearsay or unrebuttable claims. Senator Skoufis described a process of having to “meticulously, in some cases, swap out single words” to get the Office of Court Administration, the Bar Association, and other stakeholders on board. The final C-print replaced an earlier framework with explicit standards for findings and expanded evidentiary requirements. Whatever else this is, it is not a bill that sailed through on emotion. It passed the Senate with sponsors from both parties, and it passed only after the institutions most protective of judicial discretion signed off.
Second, the threshold itself. The hearing is triggered by allegations that are facially credible and that, if true, would pose a substantial risk. The presumption against unsupervised contact attaches only after the court finds substantial risk — at an evidentiary hearing, on a record, in writing. Bare assertion is not supposed to be enough. The statute is built to protect children from documented danger, not to reward unsupported claims.
Bare assertion is not supposed to be enough. The statute is built to protect children from documented danger, not to reward unsupported claims.
Third — and this is the provision nobody is covering — the appeal right. Sections of the bill amend Family Court Act §§ 1112 and 1114 and CPLR 5521 specifically to guarantee that a party may appeal initial and successive temporary orders, and the mandatory written-findings requirement gives that appeal something to grab onto.
The temporary order is the black hole of the system.
Anyone who has litigated in New York family court knows why this matters. Under current practice, the temporary order is the black hole of the system: it is issued fast, often on thin records, it hardens into the status quo, and it is functionally unreviewable while the case grinds on. Parents — fathers prominently among them — have lost years of their children’s lives to “temporary” orders that no appellate court ever examined. Kyra’s Law simultaneously makes it easier to restrict a parent at the temporary stage and, for the first time, gives that parent a statutory appellate path with a written record to challenge. A judge can no longer restrict — or refuse to restrict — without showing their work.
A judge can no longer restrict — or refuse to restrict — without showing their work.
That is an accountability mechanism. It cuts in every direction. And it is the piece of this law that both the advocacy coverage and the skeptics have ignored.
The Gender Question
Kyra Franchetti and Thomas Valva were killed by their fathers. It would be easy — and wrong — to read this law as being about fathers.
The statutory text is parent-neutral throughout. The failure pattern it targets — courts discounting documented risk — has burned protective fathers as surely as protective mothers; Thomas Valva’s mother was the one whose warnings the court dismissed before his father killed him. A father with police reports, medical records, and a documented pattern of abuse by the other parent gets the same threshold hearing, the same presumption, and the same protection from the alienation label that a mother does.
Family court outcomes should be measured, not assumed.
Whether the law is applied neutrally is a different question, and it is an empirical one. This publication’s standing position is that family court outcomes should be measured, not assumed. If Kyra’s Law is signed, the data to demand from the Office of Court Administration is straightforward: threshold hearings requested and granted, by gender of the requesting party; substantiation rates at hearing; presumption findings and rebuttals; and appellate outcomes on temporary orders. If the credibility gate is applied evenhandedly, the numbers will show it. If it becomes a one-way ratchet, the numbers will show that too. We intend to ask.
What Happens Next
Governor Hochul has not signaled her intentions — she rarely does before acting — but her office has framed child safety and domestic violence prevention as administration priorities, and she has signed related measures, including Melanie’s Law, expanding orders of protection. The realistic sticking points, if any, are implementation and money: the mandatory judicial training and the statewide supervised visitation buildout both carry costs, and Albany’s year-end ritual of chapter-amendment negotiation could trim or phase provisions before her signature.
The burden shifts to the bench — and, for the first time at the temporary-order stage, the bench will have to show its work.
The decision window runs to the end of December. Between now and then, the honest position for parents’ advocates is neither celebration nor alarm. It is vigilance: this is a law whose text answers most of the fair objections, and whose practice will be written by several hundred trial judges applying a credibility standard one case at a time.
Kyra Franchetti’s mother did what the court would not: she treated a child’s safety as the threshold question. The legislature has now agreed with her. The burden shifts to the bench — and, for the first time at the temporary-order stage, the bench will have to show its work.
That is worth watching. We will be.
Father & Co. covers family court accountability for all parents. Sources for this analysis include the text and sponsor memoranda of A.6194-C / S.5998 (NY Assembly and Senate), the New York State Assembly’s June 2026 press release on passage, Spectrum News NY State of Politics, CBS New York, amNewYork, and Kyra’s Champions.
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