Court Opinion

ID: 9775662
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 19:06:27.734426+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:32:30.087092
License: Public Domain

EDWARD P. HILL, Jr., Judge
(dissenting)-
I respectfully dissent from the able and well-written opinion of the majority. I heartily agree with the basic philosophy of the majority opinion, but not in the result reached. My dissent is based upon two propositions.
First, I construe KRS 199.470(4) as being for the benefit of the Department of Child Welfare and that the Department has a right to waive the provisions of this statute. By failing to move for the dismissal of the petition for adoption, the Department waived its right under this statute and the right of the appellees to petition for adoption of the child involved. In the meantime, the child has formed his attachments, decided who are his loved ones, and established his home. We are all agreed that the well-being of the child should be paramount in all adoption proceedings as it is in all other areas concerning the custody of children. Suppose this litigation had been drawn out for five years. It is easy to understand the trauma of a judgment uprooting a child from the only place he can call his home and taking him away from the only people whom he knows as his father and mother. Of less significance is the grief of those who are seeking to adopt. We are not dealing in this case with a chattel, but with a living human being. I would say the statute above referred to is a valid statute, but that the appellant waived its provision.
The second area in which I vigorously dissent concerns the weight to be given by *293the chancellor to reports and recommendations by the Department of Child Welfare. This court decided in McKinney v. Quertermous, 306 Ky. 169, 206 S.W.2d 473, that the recommendation of the Department of Child Welfare must be accepted by the chancellor in adoption proceedings unless the Department acted arbitrarily. It is my opinion that the recommendation of the Department should have great weight before the chancellor. To hold that the chancellor must accept the recommendation of the Department is to say that the chancellor is nothing more than a ministerial officer or a bookkeeper for the Department. The burden of proof of arbitrariness which is cast upon the party seeking adoption is in these circumstances tantamount to making the Department’s findings conclusive. The Department and its workers conduct their investigations in private and in the absence of the party seeking adoption. No one is there to represent the petitioner or cross-examine the source of information. The reports of the Department are usually a summarization of a private investigation. Furthermore, a large number of case workers in the Department of Child Welfare have no legal training.
It is difficult for me to comprehend the process of reasoning by which the majority reaches the result herein, with reference to the weight to be given by the courts to the report of the Department of Child Welfare, when the majority opinion is laid side by side with the very recent opinion in Warner v. Ward, Ky., 401 S.W.2d 62 (1966), wherein it was written by one of the majority in the present opinion that: “The reliability of the report is a matter within the competence of a qualified trial judge to weigh and determine.”
Under the majority opinion in the instant case, the trial judge had nothing to “weigh and determine.” He must follow the report as if it were a solemn edict from the Grand Potentate of -the Universe. The only instance in which the trial judge may disregard the report is where the report is arbitrary. Before he may resolve the question of arbitrariness, the party objecting to the report must attack it and raise the issue of arbitrariness and a long, drawn-out hearing on this question will naturally follow. Certainly we would not anticipate that the report would ever show arbitrariness on its face. It seems to me that the majority should have the judicial fortitude to overrule Warner v. Ward, supra, or at least try to make an effort to distinguish it, which I do not think can be accomplished.
The chancellor in the present case found as a matter of fact, based upon ample evidence, that the petitioners are suitable and qualified for the adoption, and I cannot see that his conclusions were clearly or at all erroneous. In fact, they were correct. I would sustain the chancellor in approving the adoption in this case.
NEIKIRK and REED, JJ., join in this dissent.