Citing provisions of the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act, an Alabama appeals court declines to overturn a 1998 Kentucky order granting grandparents visitation rights with a grandchild now living in Alabama. G.P. v. A.A.K. (Ala. Civ. App., No. 2000496, Dec. 21, 2001).
L.M.K. (the mother) and M.P. (the father) had a child in April 1995. Six months later, the father was killed in an automobile crash. When the mother refused to allow the father's parents, G.P. and A.P., to visit the child, the grandparents successfully sued in a Kentucky court for visitation rights. The mother later remarried and the stepfather adopted the child. The visitation judgment was modified in 1998 after the mother and her family moved to Florida. When the grandparents were denied Thanksgiving visitation, they petitioned the Kentucky court to enforce the visitation order. The mother, meanwhile, asked the Florida court to modify the Kentucky court's 1996 visitation judgment. In February 1999, the Florida court adopted the 1998 Kentucky judgment. The mother, stepfather, and child then moved to Alabama.
In March 2000, the mother asked the Circuit Court of Houston County, Alabama, to modify the grandparents' visitation judgment. The Alabama court determined that it had jurisdiction, pursuant to Alabama's version of the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act (UCCJEA). The grandparents petitioned the Kentucky court, requesting that it retain jurisdiction under Kentucky's version of the UCCJEA. The Kentucky court retained jurisdiction, and the mother appealed to the Kentucky Court of Appeals, which determined that Alabama was the more appropriate forum.
After the United States Supreme Court decided Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57 (2000), holding that the wishes of fit parents should be given priority in resolving visitation disputes, the mother petitioned the Alabama trial court to terminate of the grandparents' visitation rights on the grounds that Alabama's grandparent visitation statute was now unconstitutional. The Alabama court held the state's statute to be unconstitutional per se and declined to enforce or to modify the grandparents' visitation judgment, stating that it had no jurisdiction to modify another state's judgment or to entertain a new suit in reference to grandparental visitation under Alabama law. The grandparents appealed.
The Court of Civil Appeals of Alabama reverses. The court rules that under the UCCJEA, the Alabama Circuit Court may modify the grandparents' visitation rights granted under the Kentucky judgment, but it lacks the jurisdiction to undo that judgment. The court points out that the parents could have raised constitutional objections to the Kentucky court's award of visitation to the grandparents. "Their failure to do so," the court writes, "prevents them from reviving their foregone rights to raise any constitutional objections they might have had to the visitation ordered by the Kentucky court."
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