Facts
- Tommie Granville and Brad Troxel had two daughters and never married.
- After the couple separated, Brad lived with his parents, Jenifer and Gary Troxel, and the children regularly visited the grandparents during Brad’s weekend time.
- Brad died by suicide in 1993; afterward, the grandparents continued visiting the children.
- Granville later limited the grandparents’ visitation to one short visit per month.
- The grandparents petitioned for court-ordered visitation under Wash. Rev. Code § 26.10.160(3), which allowed “any person” to petition “at any time” and permitted visitation whenever it served the child’s best interests.
- The grandparents sought extensive visitation; Granville offered one daytime visit per month without overnights.
- The trial court ordered visitation substantially exceeding Granville’s proposal, without finding her unfit, and relied on its own best-interests assessment.
Issues
- Whether the Due Process Clause protects a fit parent’s fundamental right to make decisions concerning the care, custody, and control of her children against a third-party visitation order entered under a best-interests standard.
- Whether § 26.10.160(3), as applied, is unconstitutional because it allows a court to override a fit parent’s visitation decision without giving that decision special weight.
Decision
- The Supreme Court affirmed the judgment invalidating the visitation order.
- A plurality held that § 26.10.160(3) was unconstitutional as applied because it infringed Granville’s fundamental parental liberty interest protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.
- The plurality declined to hold that all nonparent visitation statutes are unconstitutional and did not require a categorical showing of harm in every case.
- The Court found the trial court’s approach constitutionally defective because it did not give special weight to the fit custodial parent’s decision and instead substituted the judge’s best-interests determination.
- Concurrences agreed the statute was unconstitutional, with differing rationales (including facial invalidity and strict scrutiny).
- Dissents would have upheld broader state authority to order visitation or rejected judicial enforcement of unenumerated parental rights under substantive due process.
Legal Principles
- The Due Process Clause protects a fundamental liberty interest of parents to make decisions concerning the care, custody, and control of their children.
- Fit parents are presumed to act in their children’s best interests; absent a finding of unfitness, courts must give “special weight” to a parent’s visitation decisions.
- A visitation scheme that permits broad third-party petitions and allows courts to override a fit parent based solely on an open-ended best-interests test, without deference to the parent, can violate due process as applied.
- The Constitution does not, by itself, require invalidation of all third-party visitation statutes; the constitutional analysis depends on how the statute is structured and applied.
Conclusion
The Court held that Washington’s third-party visitation statute, as applied, violated substantive due process because it allowed a judge to second-guess and override a fit parent’s visitation decision without giving that decision special weight, while leaving open the validity of more limited visitation laws that respect parental decision-making.