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A divorced father worried that his teenage daughters are at risk in their mother's home because she is married to a registered sex offender cannot have custody of the girls, the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled Friday.

A divided court upheld lower court rulings that rejected the father's request for custody of his two daughters to get them out of the home of their mother's husband, who served four years in prison after a 2003 conviction for attempted sexual assault of his then-15-year-old stepdaughter from a previous marriage.

The father, who is from Central City, argued that a Phelps County District judge was wrong to find no significant risk to his teenage girls.

The ruling upholds a Nebraska Court of Appeals opinion last year that found the district judge properly evaluated the facts of the case to determine that the stepfather does not pose a significant risk.

A four-justice majority of the Supreme Court concluded that Nebraska's law only requires the mother to produce evidence the girls are not at significant risk. The law is written in a way that presumes that since the stepfather is a sex offender with a felony offense, and has unsupervised contact with the girls, they are at risk. But it allows the custodial parent, in this case the mother, to overcome this presumption by presenting evidence.