Court Opinion

ID: 9525132
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 03:00:14.499348+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:13:07.256152
License: Public Domain

DUNN, Justice
(dissenting).
This court has held on many occasions that a parent’s maintaining of an illicit relationship which does not affect the children is not a bar to receiving custody of minor children. Krueger v. Stevens, 90 S.D. 641, 244 N.W.2d 763 (1976); Wiesner v. Wiesner, 80 S.D. 114, 119 N.W.2d 920 (1963).
However, we have also consistently held that an illicit relationship which does affect the morals and welfare of the children is a bar to receiving custody of children, and we have laid down one clear and express standard in determining whether the parents’ immoral activities do affect the morals and well-being of the children. In Spaulding v. Spaulding, 278 N.W.2d 639, 641 (S.D.1979), Justice Fosheim stated: “If the mother’s misconduct is committed in the presence of a child old enough to see and recognize her improprieties as such, then the harmful effect of her bad conduct upon the child is self-evident.” This standard was restated and reemphasized in Haskell v. Haskell, 279 N.W.2d 903 (S.D.1979) and in Madson v. Madson, 313 N.W.2d 42 (S.D.1981).
Here, we have the mother openly sleeping with her paramour in a room where these two children, ages 7 and 4, had to pass through to reach the bathroom. This was *666not an isolated incident, but a course of immoral conduct that continued for months. The trial court took comfort from the fact that the mother and her paramour were very forthright with the children, had explained that the relationship was proper because of their affection for each other, and of their intention to get married. This only compounds the effect in my opinion. They will grow up thinking this conduct is acceptable. I see no great advantage to the children becoming amoral instead of immoral. One really wonders what this mother could say to one of the children in a few years when they bring home a girl friend or a boyfriend and expect to sleep with them.
The majority, relying on Krueger, supra, now states that this immoral conduct, which had continued for months in front of the children, has been cured by a marriage ceremony which apparently occurred while this case to determine the mother’s fitness to retain custody of the children was on the way to the Supreme Court. This bit of intelligence came to the court in a self-serving statement by the mother’s attorney during oral argument and apparently from taking judicial notice of the marriage records of Davison County. There is nothing in the record or the briefs of the parties to substantiate this fact. We are sitting as an appeal court deciding whether the action of the trial court can be affirmed on the record before it and not on some statement outside of the record that was not passed on by the trial court or on official marriage records. We are really expanding our scope of review. In addition to the old standard, which only permitted a review of the record before the trial court, we now must examine and take judicial notice of all of the official records in the various counties of South Dakota.
Regardless of all this, we are considering the fitness of this mother to have custody based on immoral conduct that had continued in full view of the children for months. We should be concerned with the state of mind and moral fitness of this mother that permitted these activities rather than her marital status at the time of this decision.
I see no parallel with the Krueger, supra, case, except for the fact that the father there was living with a woman who was not his wife and married her before the case came to the Supreme Court. There was no contention in Krueger that the father and his live-in girl friend had carried on immoral activities in full view of the children or that he had “forthrightly” explained that their immoral acts were proper. It should also be remembered that the mother in Krueger had abandoned those boys, leaving the father to care for them, while she ran off to marry her new lover; that her new marriage was on the rocks; and, that the trial court there was faced with real problems in removing the custody of the children from the father and granting custody to one who had exhibited like immorality plus a lack of stability.
I would reverse.