Court Opinion

ID: 9577432
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 21:34:54.029959+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:20:36.234536
License: Public Domain

Hale, J.
(dissenting)—I dissent. This court asks whether an adopted child may inherit from her natural grandparents. Both the trial court and the Court of Appeals, 5 Wn. App. 158, 486 P.2d 1158 (1971), answered yes, and I agree. I would, therefore, adopt the opinion of the Court of Appeals verbatim as declaring the law of the state in this case.
But there are other reasons, I think, why the granddaughter is entitled to an inheritance and why the statute, RCW 11.04.085, declaring that an adopted child shall not be considered an heir of his natural parents, does not operate to disinherit the granddaughter from her grandfather’s estate. As the Court of Appeals so clearly delineated, the statute applies to a parent and child; it does not, except by the most strained analysis and construction, apply to grandparent and grandchild—particularly where the adoption arose from the marriage of the grandchild’s widowed natural mother. The grandchild’s adoption by her widowed mother’s second husband should not be held to affect the lineal relationship between granddaughter and grandfather.
One should note the absence of the simple declarative in RCW 11.04.085. The statute does not say that the adopted child shall not inherit, but instead employs the less categorical terminology that an adopted child shall not be considered an “ ‘heir’ of his natural parents” for the purpose of *440the title. In reaching the result obtained, the court has had to follow what appears to me to be a labyrinthine maze of statutory interpretation, which I find both unnecessary and inapplicable. If the legislature had intended that the grandchild be disinherited, it could readily have said so. This would, of course, have raised the constitutional question of whether the legislature can lawfully provide that some grandchildren may inherit from their grandparents and great grandparents and other grandchildren in the same degrees of propinquity shall not, and whether there exists sufficient basis under the constitution to sustain the creation of two distinct classes of grandchildren under the descent and distribution statutes.
If the circumstances of this case are changed slightly, the flaw in the court’s opinion becomes apparent. Had the plaintiff granddaughter, Jean Louise Iverson, in this case been the sole surviving descendant of her grandfather, John J. Donnelly, Sr., then under the court’s opinion, all of the estate of her grandfather, John J. Donnelly, Sr., would escheat to the state. Such a forfeiture of estate, I think, was neither intended by the legislature nor reasonably contemplated by the language it employed in RCW 11.04.085.
One can readily agree with the court’s proposition that the legislature has designed the adoption and inheritance code so as to make an adopted child the full equal in law with a natural child and, so far as the law can do so, to establish a relationship between adopted parents and adopted children identical to that of natural parents and children. To that end it expressly enacted that the natural parents are divested of all legal rights and obligations; that the adopted child becomes “to all legal intents and purposes and for all legal incidents” the child, legal heir and lawful issue of her adopters, RCW 26.32.140, and that all adoption papers shall be sealed, and remain unopened except upon order of the superior court for good cause shown, and, if so opened, to be sealed again as before. RCW 26.32.150.
But nothing in the Court of Appeals opinion militates against the integrity and totality of an adoption. To the *441contrary, that opinion augments this legislatively declared public policy of upholding and preserving the adoption, where this court’s opinion will operate against it. Here, the grandfather’s son died; his widowed daughter-in-law eventually remarried, and she consented that her new husband adopt her daughter. The new family relationship created by the marriage and adoption presented none of the circumstances of an adoption designed in law to cut off all familial and legal relationships with the adopted child’s natural mother nor her grandparents either. The grandchild continued to live with her natural mother and adoptive father presumably with the full knowledge of her grandfather, whose lineal descendant she remained. None of the factors upon which the legislature legislated to seal the records of adoption against the grandfather existed here. And, although the adoption statute makes this granddaughter no less an adopted daughter of her mother’s husband, it ought not to be read to make her less a granddaughter of her natural grandfather either. The statute which the court now says disinherits the granddaughter cannot, as the court now says, serve to give the natural granddaughter a “fresh start” or a “clean slate” in the relationship created by the adoption. One is hard put to find where a statute which operates to cut off the plaintiff grandchild from her grandfather’s estate gives her a fresh start or a clean slate. The statute could not, and thus did not sever all ties with the past. While it might have severed whatever legal ties existed between her and her dead father, whose heir she had already been, the adoption could not be reasonably said to do the same with respect to her natural grandfather.
The court’s opinion depends largely on In re Estate of Wiltermood, 78 Wn.2d 238, 472 P.2d 536 (1970), as a basis for holding here that if the statute, RCW 11.04.085, deprives the adopted child of heirship from its natural parent or parents, it operates ipso facto necessarily to cut off the child’s right to inherit from its natural grandparent or grandparents. Wiltermood went no further than to cover *442the actual issue in controversy and should not be extended by implication to go beyond its reasonable intendments. It arose after enactment of the statute, RCW 11.04.085, and was made in contemplation of this court’s earlier decision in In re Estate of Roderick, 158 Wash. 377, 291 P. 325, 80 A.L.R. 1398 (1930), which held—before the present statute had been enacted—that an adopted child, unless barred by statute, may inherit from both its adoptive parents and its natural parents. Only after making clear that, unless there was a statute to the contrary, adoption did not cut off heirship from the adopted child’s natural parents, did Wiltermood declare its raison d’etre—that RCW 11.04.085 was such a statute. Wiltermood must be limited in application to the language of RCW 11.04.085, which bars inheritance by descent and distribution from the natural parents only.
The court seems to find some operative significance in the statute which declares that those who are of equal degree of kinship to the intestate take in equal shares, but if of unequal degree, those of the more remote degree take by representation. RCW 11.04.015. I see no such operative distinction so far as the actual right to inherit is concerned, except that the statute does establish a fair and reasonable system of classification of the beneficiaries of an intestate and proceeds to treat as equals all those within the same class. Here, Kathleen M. Kelly was the daughter, the sole survivor of that class; and Jean Louise Iverson was the granddaughter, the sole survivor of that class. The statute of descent and distribution does no more than reaffirm or restate the eld common-law distinction between taking per stirpes and taking per capita. Thus, in taking “by representation,” Jean Louise Iverson is the beneficiary per stirpes, and is entitled to all of the share devolving “by representation” or per stirpes to the grandchildren, and Kathleen M. Kelly, as the sole surviving child, would take that part descending to her as a child the same as though her brother, plaintiff’s father, had survived. I see nothing in that statute (RCW 11.04.015) which suggests in any way that the subsequent adoption of the child should cut off the *443existence of that class of heirs described as grandchildren or abrogate their taking “by representation” or per stirpes.
Thus, as earlier observed, I would affirm the Court of Appeals and thereby affirm the trial court.
Finley, Rosellini, and Hunter, JJ., concur with Hale, J.
Petition for rehearing denied January 4, 1973.