Part three of an eight-part series examining five unreported appellate opinions in Reichert v. Hornbeck.
On February 2, 2022, a circuit court judge in Anne Arundel County did something that had no clear precedent in Maryland’s reported family law.
At the conclusion of a two-day evidentiary hearing, Judge Alison L. Asti ordered Jeffrey Reichert to have zero contact with his son for ninety days. Not reduced contact. Not supervised contact. Zero. No phone calls. No texts. No communication of any kind. The child — G.R., then twelve years old, who had lived primarily with his father for years, who had himself testified years earlier about his mother’s conduct — was taken from the courtroom that same day and placed immediately into Sarah Hornbeck’s custody. When the judge told G.R. what was happening, the appellate opinion notes, he was noticeably upset and appeared to have difficulty accepting the decision.
The order was intended as a reunification mechanism. The appellate opinion that affirmed it was unreported. And to understand why that matters, you have to understand what the opinion leaves out — which is almost everything that got the case to that courtroom in the first place.
How Reichert Got Custody — and How That History Disappeared
The February 2022 hearing did not happen in a vacuum. Jeffrey Reichert had primary custody of G.R. for a documented reason: Sarah Hornbeck had it taken away from her.
In June 2019, G.R. told Reichert that Hornbeck had passed out from drinking during a trip to the Eastern Shore, leaving him and his three-year-old brother alone for hours. Reichert filed a petition for protection. The Circuit Court for Baltimore City issued a Final Protective Order on August 22, 2019, awarding physical and legal custody of G.R. to Reichert and restricting Hornbeck to supervised visitation every other weekend.
In October 2019, the parties entered into a 48-page Final Consent Order modifying that arrangement to joint legal custody with primary physical custody and tie-breaking authority to Reichert. The consent order contained explicit conditions restricting Hornbeck’s access to G.R. because of her documented history of child neglect and substance abuse.
In February 2020, Reichert filed to extend the underlying protective order. The reason: Hornbeck had failed multiple sobriety tests in connection with her probation — the same probation she was serving for the 2018 arrest in Charles County, where she was charged with driving under the influence and assaulting a law enforcement officer. G.R. had also told Reichert she had physically abused him during a recent interaction involving alcohol. The Baltimore City court granted the extension.
That is the baseline. Reichert had primary custody because of what G.R. reported, because of what the courts in Baltimore City found, and because of a consent order Hornbeck herself signed acknowledging her history.
Five months after that extension was granted — in July 2020, while Hornbeck was still on probation, one month before that probation ended — she filed a motion to modify custody in the Circuit Court for Anne Arundel County. According to the federal civil rights complaint Reichert later filed, which survived a motion to dismiss in federal court, Hornbeck falsely claimed to reside in Anne Arundel County when she filed that motion. She actually lived in Baltimore City. The complaint alleges she filed in Anne Arundel County specifically to circumvent the Baltimore City court’s orders and the mandatory mediation clause in the consent order she had signed.
That filing — and the jurisdictional question it raised — is the foundation of everything that followed, including the February 2022 hearing. It is absent from Opinion 2.
The Judges, the Pattern, and the Asymmetry
Between July 2020 and February 2022, three circuit court judges handled significant proceedings in this case in Anne Arundel County. Their decisions consistently went against Reichert.
Judge Donna McCabe Schaeffer presided over the UCCJEA jurisdictional hearing on October 8, 2021 — the proceeding where Reichert asked the court to terminate Maryland’s jurisdiction, given that he had moved to Virginia with G.R. in January 2021 and the case had originated in Baltimore City. Judge Schaeffer denied the motion. Maryland’s jurisdiction remained in Anne Arundel County.
Judge Alison L. Asti presided over the contempt proceedings, the body attachment, and the pendente lite modifications — including the February 2022 hearing. She jailed Reichert for contempt on August 5, 2021, after he failed to produce G.R. for visitation. Reichert’s stated reason for not producing G.R. was that he had obtained a protective order on G.R.’s behalf from a court in Chesapeake, Virginia, which he argued prevented the transfer. Judge Asti found that the Virginia filing was made solely to block Maryland jurisdiction and constituted direct civil contempt. Reichert served eight days before purging the contempt by producing G.R.
What did not happen during this period is equally significant. Hornbeck had failed multiple probation sobriety tests — documented in the federal complaint and confirmed in her own deposition testimony in 2026. Those failures violated the terms of her probation for assaulting a police officer. The family court proceedings appear to reflect no consequence for those violations. No motion was filed to revisit her access to G.R. in light of continued sobriety failures. No court ordered reassessment of whether the conditions that originally justified Reichert’s primary custody had changed.
Reichert was jailed for withholding visitation. Hornbeck’s documented probation violations produced no comparable consequence in the same proceedings.
The Child’s Testimony — and the Question the Opinion Never Asks
At the center of the February 2022 hearing was what G.R. said in his in-camera interview with Judge Asti and court evaluator Terri Harger. According to the opinion, G.R. told them that when he was ten, his father had said he could not “hide things from you anymore” and had shared what was happening in court regarding his mother. G.R. referred to his mother as a “psychopath” and said, “Everything she does annoys me.” The evaluator’s conclusion was that G.R. was “being coached.”
The court accepted that framing. The appellate court affirmed it. But the opinion never asks the question that the full record raises directly:
G.R. had given similar testimony before — and that testimony had previously been credited as grounds for restricting Hornbeck’s access to him.
It was G.R.’s 2019 account of Hornbeck’s intoxication and neglect that led to the Final Protective Order giving Reichert custody. It was G.R.’s reports of Hornbeck’s physical abuse that led Reichert to seek the 2020 extension. G.R.’s negative views of his mother were documented in the case record before the specific period of “coaching” the court identified began.
The opinion treats G.R.’s expressed hostility toward Hornbeck as the product of Reichert’s influence, to be corrected by removing Reichert’s influence. It does not address whether G.R.’s views might have an independent basis rooted in what he had actually experienced — the same experiences that had previously been found credible enough to justify Hornbeck losing custody.
That question — whether a child’s expressed views represent coaching or genuine experience — is one of the most contested and consequential questions in family law involving allegations of parental alienation. The court resolved it without a published answer, in an unreported opinion, decided on papers without oral argument.
What Happened at the Hearing
The February 2022 hearing was a two-day evidentiary proceeding. Both parties testified. Helen Laird, the court-appointed custody evaluator, testified. Terri Harger was present for the in-camera interview with G.R. and provided her assessment.
Judge Asti’s ruling from the bench was emphatic. She found that Reichert had made G.R. available to his mother only twice in two years — “really, for Christmas and Maine.” She stated plainly that if the current arrangement continued, Reichert was “simply not going to make him available.” The ninety-day no-contact order, she concluded, was the only way to give G.R. an uninterrupted opportunity to form a genuine relationship with Hornbeck.
What the opinion does not note is that the hearing itself produced no transcript available to the appellate court in the way that a full trial would. The appellate panel reviewed the record as it existed — the circuit court’s findings, the evaluator’s testimony, the hearing sheet signed as order of court. Reichert had no opportunity for oral argument before the appellate panel. Opinion 2 was decided entirely on papers. The panel’s only window into what happened at the February 2022 hearing was the circuit court’s own account of it.
The Legal Questions — And Why They Matter
Opinion 2, authored by Judge Kevin Shaw, resolved three legal questions that are significant, recurring, and unreported.
First: Does a court need to find a “material change in circumstances” before modifying a pendente lite order?
This is the threshold question in any custody modification. Under settled Maryland law, modifying a final custody order requires a showing that something significant has changed since the prior order was entered. The bar is deliberately high, intended to provide stability and discourage endless re-litigation.
Reichert argued the same requirement applied here — before the court could reverse primary custody even on a pendente lite basis, it needed to find a material change.
The court said no. Under Kovacs v. Kovacs, 98 Md. App. 289 (1993), modifying a pendente lite order does not require a material change finding. The proper standard is simply the best interest of the child.
Kovacs is from 1993 and was decided in circumstances far less extreme than this one. It established flexibility for incremental pendente lite adjustments. The present case applied it to justify a complete reversal of primary custody and a ninety-day zero-contact order imposed on a parent who had been the primary caregiver for years, based in significant part on what a twelve-year-old said in a private interview. Whether Kovacs was designed for modifications of this magnitude — and whether a higher evidentiary bar should apply — is a question Maryland family courts will face in every high-conflict alienation case where emergency intervention is considered. The answer given here cannot be cited.
Second: Must a court make express on-the-record findings for each Sanders factor?
Maryland’s custody framework requires courts to weigh ten specific factors — parental fitness, character, the child’s preference, opportunity for visitation, and others. Reichert argued the court had not addressed each factor expressly. The appellate court held that express enumeration is not required; what matters is that the record demonstrates the factors were considered.
That is a meaningful procedural clarification that affects how circuit court custody rulings are written and how they are challenged on appeal. Unreported.
Third: Was the interlocutory appeal properly before the court?
The court confirmed in a footnote — a footnote — that an order depriving a parent of custody is immediately appealable under Maryland Code, Courts & Judicial Proceedings § 12-303(3)(x). A parent facing a pendente lite custody reversal needs to know they can appeal immediately, before waiting for the merits hearing. The answer — yes — is in a footnote of an unreported opinion.
The Hinge Point
The February 2022 order was not simply a temporary adjustment. It was the moment the case turned from a dispute about visitation into a wholesale transfer of custody. The ninety-day no-contact provision became the foundation for everything that followed: the eight-day trial in September 2022, the permanent award of sole custody to Hornbeck, the $100,000 attorney’s fees against Reichert, and the supervised-only visitation that was later reduced to supervised phone calls only, and then effectively eliminated. Jeffrey Reichert has not had in-person contact with his son in more than four years.
Opinion 2 affirmed that hinge point. It did so in thirteen pages that present one version of a deeply contested factual record, decided without oral argument, by a panel that had no mechanism to interrogate the circuit court’s findings directly. The child at the center of all of this had already told courts what he experienced in his mother’s care, years before any of the proceedings this opinion addresses. Those reports were credited then. The same child’s later hostility toward his mother became evidence of his father’s wrongdoing. How that transition happened — and whether it was explained by coaching, by genuine experience, or by something the system itself produced — is nowhere examined in the public legal record.
That is what it means for an opinion to be unreported. The questions it answered don’t go away. The next court will face them again — and it will have nothing from this case to work from.
What Gets Buried — For Every Case That Comes After
The unreported designation does something specific and consequential that goes well beyond this case.
Consider what a Maryland family law attorney faces today when advising a client in a high-conflict custody dispute where one parent is alleged to have alienated the child from the other. That attorney needs to know: when can a court invoke emergency pendente lite intervention and impose total no-contact? What evidentiary threshold applies? Is a material change in circumstances required? Must the court make express findings on the Sanders factors, or is implicit consideration sufficient? If the client wants to appeal a pendente lite custody reversal immediately, can they?
These are not exotic questions. They arise in contested custody proceedings across Maryland every week. And the answers — given in detail, applied to a real fact pattern, grounded in the actual record of what happened — exist in Opinion 2. An attorney who finds that opinion, reads it carefully, and understands its holdings has a roadmap for advising clients in precisely these situations.
But they cannot cite it. They cannot point a circuit court judge to it and say: “This is what the Appellate Court held when it faced this question.” They cannot use it to challenge a ruling that reached a different conclusion. They cannot cite it in a brief. They cannot rely on it as authority. Under Maryland Rule 1-104, it is persuasive at best — a suggestion, not a directive — and its persuasive weight is undermined by the very boilerplate that appears on its first page warning readers not to treat it as precedent.
What Opinion 2 buried for the legal community is this: the most detailed appellate analysis of emergency pendente lite intervention in a parental alienation context that Maryland’s appellate courts have produced — applied to a fact pattern that is becoming more common, not less, as high-conflict custody disputes increasingly involve one parent alleging alienation and the other alleging false accusation — is invisible to the system that needs it most.
Legal scholars studying parental alienation doctrine in Maryland will not find this case in their research. Law students learning custody modification law will not encounter it. Attorneys writing briefs on the limits of Kovacs will not know it was applied here. The next parent — in any Maryland county, before any Maryland judge — who faces a ninety-day zero-contact order as a reunification mechanism will have no published authority telling them whether that order is legally sound, what standard governs it, or how a court must justify it.
And beyond the doctrine, what gets buried is accountability. Opinion 2 resolved a contested factual dispute — one where a parent who had been awarded primary custody because of the other parent’s documented conduct was stripped of all contact with his child, on papers, without oral argument, in proceedings where the asymmetry of judicial responses to each party’s violations was stark and documented. A published opinion would be subject to scrutiny. Legal commentators could examine it. Other courts could engage with it. The reasoning would be tested in public. An unreported opinion forecloses all of that. The result stands. The reasoning is sealed. And the pattern that produced it — in this case and in every similar case that comes after — continues undisturbed.
That is the system working as designed. The question this series asks is whether the design is serving the people it was meant to protect.
Next in the series: Article 4 — “When Parental Alienation Becomes Child Abuse, and No One Can Cite It.” An examination of Opinion 3 (No. 1370), the most consequential unreported family law opinion in this series — the eight-day trial, the $100,000 attorney’s fees award, and the five distinct legal questions the court resolved in an opinion that cannot be used.
Opinion No. 0125, September Term 2022, was filed September 12, 2022, authored by Judge Kevin Shaw of the Appellate Court of Maryland. It is available through the Maryland Judiciary Case Search. Background facts regarding Hornbeck’s probation history, the circumstances of the 2020 custody filing, and the pattern of criminal charges are drawn from the federal civil rights complaint in Reichert v. Hornbeck et al., Case No. 1:24-cv-01865-JMC (D. Md.), which survived a motion to dismiss, from Hornbeck’s February 27, 2026 deposition, and from the master case timeline published at freegrantreichert.com.
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