Court Opinion

ID: 9721832
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 09:10:42.637175+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:24:28.869442
License: Public Domain

OTIS, Justice
(dissenting in part).
I join in the views expressed by Justice Wahl, and particularly take issue with a rule which authorizes what is euphemistically described as “limitations upon the adult child’s mobility” whenever a parent, or indeed a stranger acting for a parent, subjectively decides, without the benefit of a professional opinion or judicial intervention, that the adult child’s “judgmental capacity” is impaired and that she should be “extricated” from what is deemed to be a religious or pseudo-religious cult.
The rule adopted by the majority states: We hold that where parents, or their agents, acting under the conviction that the judgmental capacity of their adult child is impaired, seek to extricate that child from what they reasonably believe to be a religious or pseudo-religious cult, and the child at some juncture assents to the actions in question, limitations upon the child’s mobility do not constitute meaningful deprivations of personal liberty sufficient to support a judgment for false imprisonment.
We furnish no guidelines or criteria for what constitutes “impaired judgmental capacity” other than the fact that the adult child has embraced an unorthodox doctrine with a zeal which has given the intervenor cause for alarm, a concern which may be well-founded, ill-founded, or unfounded.
Nor do we specify whether the “cult” must be for a benign or a malevolent purpose. It is enough that the intervenor has reason to believe it is a cult i. e. “an unorthodox system of belief” and that at some juncture during the adult child’s involuntary confinement, she “assents,” that is to say, yields or surrenders, possibly from exhaustion or fatigue, and possibly for a period only long enough to regain her composure.
If there is any constitutional protection we should be slow to erode it is the right of serious-minded people, young or old, well-adjusted, or maladjusted, to search for religious or philosophical fulfillment in their own way and in their own time without the interference of meddling friends or relatives, however well-intentioned they may be.
At age 21, a daughter is no longer a child. She is an adult. Susan Peterson was not only an adult in 1976 but she was a bright, well-educated adult. For whatever reason, she was experiencing a period of restlessness and insecurity which is by no means uncommon in students of that age. But to hold that for seeking companionship and identity in a group whose proselyting tactics may well be suspect, she must endure without a remedy the degrading and humiliating treatment she received at the hands of her parents, is, in my opinion, totally at odds with the basic rights of young people to think unorthodox thoughts, join unorthodox groups, and proclaim unorthodox views. I would reverse the denial of recovery as to that cause of action.