By Dru Sefton. The Seattle Times. Newhouse News Service. Wednesday, June 7, 2000, 12:00 a.m. Pacific
WASHINGTON - Lurking behind this week's Supreme Court ruling favoring parents in custody matters is a small Cuban boy named Elian Gonzalez.
Some family-law experts say the decision, issued in a Washington state grandparents'-rights case, may help Juan Miguel Gonzalez in his efforts to regain custody of his son; others remain convinced that immigration issues must prevail.
The justices limited their attention to a specific Washington state case involving court-ordered visitation for grandparents. Nonetheless, experts predict that lower courts will interpret the ruling broadly and make it much more difficult for third parties - such as Elian's great-uncle and
second cousin - to see children in contested visitation cases.
And some say it may foreshadow how the Supreme Court would rule in the Elian matter.
It adds another layer to an already complex case.
Juan Miguel Gonzalez remains in the United States, battling the objections of Miami relatives to taking his son back to Cuba. Since Elian was plucked from the ocean following a shipwreck out of Cuba last November, his plight has escalated into massive international controversy.
"What the Elian case has been all about is politics," said Howard Davidson, director of the American Bar Association's Center on Children and the Law.
"It's embarrassing," said John Mayoue, an Atlanta attorney and author of "Competing Interests in Family Law: Legal Rights and Duties of Third Parties, Spouses and Significant Others."
The Supreme Court ruling is consistent with the Immigration and Naturalization Service's position regarding the Gonzalez case, Davidson said: that when dealing with fit parents, parental rights prevail over other interests.
"And the INS has said that in very strong language. That's a very old underpinning in principle of our legal system. This ruling is simply an affirmation of that," Davidson added.
John Crouch, an Arlington, Va., attorney specializing in international child-custody law, pointed out that parental rights also figured into the case that Elian's Miami relatives lost last week in a federal appeals court.
"I've heard other lawyers say this is a signal of how the Supreme Court may rule" if the relatives decide to push their case that far, Crouch added.
And that is how it should be, Mayoue said.
But to Sheri Steisel, spokeswoman for the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, the Supreme Court's 6-3 decision in the Washington case "raises more questions than are resolved."
"Only four of the justices could actually agree on a reason for supporting the custodial parent in this case. Legal precedent is five," Steisel said.
The Washington case also deals only with fit parents, "which is different from a parent that is harming or might harm a child."
Would Juan Miguel Gonzalez be harming Elian if he returned him to Cuba and its totalitarian society?
"That's a very good question," Steisel said. But because the Washington case is family law, she said, it doesn't directly apply.
"The Elian case deals primarily in who can speak for a child in an immigration context," Steisel said.
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