Cooley v. St. Andre's Child Placing Agency

• Decision Date: 23 June 1980
• Citation: 415 A.2d 1084
• Parties: Melanie COOLEY v. ST. ANDRE'S CHILD PLACING AGENCY and Gilbert L. Domingue.
• Court: Maine Supreme Court

Page 1084

415 A.2d 1084

Melanie COOLEY v. ST. ANDRE'S CHILD PLACING AGENCY and Gilbert L. Domingue.

Supreme Judicial Court of Maine.

Argued June 3, 1980.

Decided June 23, 1980.

Smith, Elliott, Wood & Nelson, P. A. by George F. Wood (orally), Karen B. Lovell (orally), Saco, for plaintiff.

Preti, Flaherty & Beliveau by John Paul Erler (orally), Joel C. Martin, Portland, for defendants.

Before McKUSICK, C. J., and WERNICK, NICHOLS, GLASSMAN and ROBERTS, JJ.

McKUSICK, Chief Justice.

Petitioner Melanie Cooley appeals from the denial by the Superior Court (York County) of her petition for a writ of habeas corpus. Mrs. Cooley, the prospective adoptive mother of a baby girl placed with her and her husband by St. Andre's Child Placing Agency in 1979, brought the petition after St. Andre's removed the baby from her custody nearly ten months after the placement. On appeal Mrs. Cooley urges that we reverse the Superior Court's determination of the baby's best interests and order that the baby be restored to her physical custody.

We deny the appeal.

The essential facts are not in dispute and may be briefly stated. After a series of interviews with St. Andre's, petitioner and her husband, Harold Cooley, were approved in 1978 as prospective adoptive parents. On May 18, 1979, Sarah, then barely a month old, was placed in the Cooleys' home. The "Adoptive Home Placement Agreement," signed that day by the Agency and the Cooleys, stated that Sarah was placed "with a view to adoption (by the Cooleys) . . . within six months to a year." The agreement provided, however, that St. Andre's "reserve(d) the right to remove (Sarah) from (the Cooleys) if at any time previous to legal adoption in the judgment of the Agency such removal is for the best interests of said child."

During the fall of 1979 the Cooleys began to experience marital problems. By December Mr. Cooley was unemployed and the family's savings depleted. After a series of arguments culminating in a physical confrontation petitioner left her husband and went with Sarah to Connecticut to stay with her parents. After initiating divorce proceedings in Maine, petitioner on March 12 took the baby to St. Andre's in Biddeford to discuss the situation; Mr. Cooley, who had expressed an interest in being involved in the adoption discussions, did not appear. The Agency's administrator and supervisor made the decision to remove Sarah from petitioner's custody, and Mrs. Cooley left the meeting without the baby. ¹

Mrs. Cooley promptly filed a habeas corpus petition, and a hearing on the petition was held in the Superior Court on March 24 and 25, 1980. During the initial colloquy of counsel and the court, it was generally agreed that the hearing would focus on the best interests of Sarah in determining whether to return physical custody of her to petitioner. The court's equity jurisdiction was thus invoked by petitioner, recognized and acknowledged as the basic issue by respondents, and fully exercised by the Superior Court justice. After hearing evidence, including testimony from petitioner herself, the justice made oral findings on the record that Sarah's best interests would not be served by returning her to the physical custody of Mrs. Cooley, and he denied the petition for a writ of habeas corpus.

Our review of a "best interests" determination is confined to the question whether the trial court in exercising its equity jurisdiction abused its discretion. Roussel v. State, Me., 274 A.2d 909, 926 (1971). "A single (j) ustice who is asked to act as a 'wise, affectionate, and careful parent' to do 'what is best for the interest of the child' must be held to be invested with a broad discretion." Id., quoting Finlay v. Finlay, 240 N.Y. 429, 433, 148 N.E. 624, 626 (1925). The trial justice who hears and is able to appraise all the testimony of the parties and their experts in social work and child psychology thus exercises a broad discretion, and is charged with a correspondingly weighty responsibility, to determine the particularly sensitive question of a child's best interests. His judgment, when properly exercised on the basis of the evidence before him, is entitled to very substantial deference. The issue on appeal in a child custody case is not at all what appellate judges from reading the cold record would themselves think to be best for the child. An appellate court's independent evaluation of the evidence is especially inappropriate on a delicate issue of this sort. We are aware of only one jurisdiction in which the appellate court applies an "independent evaluation" standard of review. See In re Snellgrose, 432 Pa. 158, 247 A.2d 596 (1968).

The question on appeal before this court thus is whether the Superior Court justice, viewing the situation as it existed on March 25, abused his discretion by concluding that Sarah's best interests would not be...