Court Opinion

ID: 9626605
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 08:19:12.087789+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:06:30.917868
License: Public Domain

JOSEPH, C. J.,
dissenting.
I disagree with the majority with respect both to its definition of the term “custodian” and to its result.
I disagree much more strongly with the legislature’s adoption of an unwarranted and unconscionable invitation to expand the field of judicial battling over children in the *517context of marriage dissolutions. Apparently, the legislature learned very little from its ill-conceived and misbegotten adventures into joint custody, and it has once again allowed itself to be bamboozled by selfish pressure groups into creating problems for the judiciary to solve. Unfortunately, courts have to struggle as best they can to apply really dumb laws —and this is such an instance.
The majority defines “custodian” to mean only the parent who has been awarded legal custody, individually or jointly, by the dissolution judgment. The effect is that, in this instance, if the grandparents’ son had refused them any visitation with the child, they could not ask for judicial assistance, because he is not the “custodian.” I see no reason to adopt the majority’s narrow reading of the word, regardless of what selected legislative witnesses might have said, especially when it will produce such an undesirable consequence. Nothing in the statute compels the majority’s reading to a weird result.
Our review is de novo. The majority’s affirmance of the trial court means that the mother must share her court awarded custody with the grandparents, one of whom the record makes clear is her enemy. Moreover, the result effectively expands father’s visitation without a sufficient inquiry into whether he has done all that he could to preserve the nascent relationship between the child and the grandparents.
I would deny grandparents’ request and thereby encourage them to stop interfering, even though the legislature has chosen to encourage their interference. We should not join in that game, except in most unusual circumstances. There is no excuse here for penalizing mother.