Meade v. Meade

• Decision Date: 03 March 1987
• Docket Number: No. 86-1574,86-1574
• Citation: 812 F.2d 1473
• Parties: Ann C. MEADE, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Frank O. MEADE, Defendant-Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit

Page 1473

812 F.2d 1473

55 USLW 2535

Ann C. MEADE, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Frank O. MEADE, Defendant-Appellee.

No. 86-1574.

United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.

Argued Nov. 10, 1986.

Decided March 3, 1987.

R. Hayes Hofler, III (Pulley, Watson, King & Hofler, P.A., Durham, N.C., on brief), for plaintiff-appellant.

Susan Hollingsworth Lewis (Lewis & Associates, Chapel Hill, N.C., on brief), for defendant-appellee.

Before PHILLIPS and WILKINSON, Circuit Judges, Terrence W. BOYLE, United States District Judge for the Eastern District of North Carolina, sitting by designation.

JAMES DICKSON PHILLIPS, Circuit Judge:

This case involves conflicting child custody orders entered by the states of Virginia and North Carolina. The United States District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina applied the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act of 1980, 28 U.S.C. Sec. 1738A (PKPA), designed by Congress expressly to resolve such conflicts, and concluded that the Virginia order was entitled to enforcement by the courts of North Carolina under principles of Full Faith and Credit. Appellant Ann Meade appeals that final order, contending that the district court misapplied the PKPA. We disagree with her and affirm.

I

On November 10, 1982, the Virginia Circuit Court for the County of Pittsylvania awarded appellee Frank Meade an unconditional divorce from appellant Ann Meade. While the court had awarded the father temporary custody of their three children pending the final divorce decree, he voluntarily agreed to give the mother permanent custody of the two youngest children. In the final custody order, the father retained visitation rights for these two youngest children and retained permanent custody of the oldest child. When the divorce action commenced, both parents and all three children resided in Virginia. The mother and two younger children now reside in North Carolina.

In August 1985, the mother and father disagreed on plans to allow one of the younger children, Edmund, to live with the father in Virginia. The mother turned to a North Carolina state district court for an ex parte order, and the court assumed custody jurisdiction and awarded temporary legal and physical custody of Edmund to the mother in August 1985. The father responded by obtaining an ex parte order from the same Virginia circuit court which issued the divorce and initial custody decree. On September 3, 1985, this Virginia court declared that Virginia had continuing custody jurisdiction over all three children, that it had not and would not relinquish jurisdiction, and that Edmund's best interests required his return to his father's custody. The Virginia court also requested the North Carolina court to vacate its ex parte order.

On September 24, 1985, the North Carolina court, rejecting the father's contentions that North Carolina lacked both personal and custody jurisdiction, awarded temporary custody of Edmund to the mother. The father did not appeal. On November 8, 1985, the Virginia court awarded temporary custody to the father and ordered the mother to deliver the child. The mother, who appeared before the Virginia court, did not appeal.

Rather than obey the Virginia order, the mother sought a declaratory judgment in United States District Court, claiming that North Carolina had exclusive jurisdiction under the terms of the PKPA. The district court disagreed, 650 F.Supp. 205, and the mother appeals.

II

Before passage of the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act of 1980, 28 U.S.C. Sec. 1738A, the notorious confusion surrounding interstate custody disputes encouraged one parent to abduct his or her own children from the parent with custody and then shop for a forum which would enter a different custody order. Even when "parental kidnapping" was not involved, one or both divorced spouses often moved and sought a different custody order from their new state of residence. The result, seen with depressing frequency, was conflicting custody orders from two states, neither willing to concede the exclusive custody jurisdiction of the other. The victims of this jurisdictional disorder included not only the children and their parents, but also principles of interstate comity.

For a number of reasons, the federal courts proved unwilling to attack the problem. First, in a line of cases stemming from dictum in Barber v. Barber, 62 U.S. (21 How.) 582, 604-05 (1859) (Daniel, J., dissenting), federal courts refused to recognize subject matter jurisdiction over cases involving probate or domestic relations. 14 C. Wright, A. Miller & E. Cooper, Federal Practice and Procedure: Jurisdiction Sec. 3609 (1975). Thus, even when the parties to a domestic dispute could satisfy the requirements of the federal diversity statute, 28 U.S.C. Sec. 1332, a federal court would dismiss the case for lack of subject matter jurisdiction. Second, a line of Supreme Court decisions inconclusively suggested that federal courts might not grant full faith and credit to child custody decrees because they are invariably subject to modification and thus not "final," and because a contrary rule would entangle federal courts in the complicated determination of the merits of child custody orders. See Ford v. Ford, 371 U.S. 187, 193-94, 83 S.Ct. 273, 276-77, 9 L.Ed.2d 240 (1962); Kovacs v. Brewer, 356 U.S. 604, 607, 78 S.Ct. 963, 965, 2 L.Ed.2d 1008 (1958); May v. Anderson, 345 U.S. 528, 73 S.Ct. 840, 97 L.Ed. 1221 (1953); New York ex rel. Halvey v. Halvey, 330 U.S. 610, 612-15, 67 S.Ct. 903, 905-06, 91 L.Ed. 1133 (1947). See also Currie, Full Faith and Credit, Chiefly to Judgments: A Role for Congress, 1964 Sup.Ct.Rev. 89, 115.

The Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction Act, now adopted by all 50 states, represented a novel effort to resolve the confusion by promulgating coherent and uniform rules for determining custody jurisdiction. See Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction Act, 9 U.L.A. 111 (1979). The UCCJA sought to impose order on chaos principally by forcing the resolution of modification issues in the court which initially made a custody determination. Section 14 provides that when "a court of another state has made a custody decree, a court of this State shall not modify that decree" so long as the state with initial jurisdiction retains any basis for initial jurisdiction substantially in accord with the second state's jurisdictional law. Section 15, in turn, provides that the second state will enforce the decree of the initial state as long as the initial state retains custody jurisdiction. When both states have adopted the UCCJA, the apparent effect of Secs. 14 and 15 is to give continuing exclusive jurisdiction to the initial state so long as that state retains a "significant connection" basis for jurisdiction. This feature reduces the incentive for moving the child to another "home state" in order to manufacture a new custody jurisdiction.

Unfortunately, the UCCJA has proven to be an imperfect remedy. While all states have now adopted some version of the UCCJA, they have enacted different versions and state courts have varied in their interpretations of the Act's requirements. Some states, for example, conclude that the Act permits them to modify another state's order as long as it has jurisdiction under the Act to issue an initial order. See Krauskopf, Remedies for Parental Kidnapping in Federal Court: A Comment Applying the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act in Support of Judge Edwards, 45 Ohio St.L.J. 429 (1984). The result has been variation where uniformity is desperately needed.

Congress designed the PKPA to remedy the defects of the UCCJA with a uniform federal statute. While under the UCCJA scheme some states profess to find modification jurisdiction so long as they can properly exercise initial custody jurisdiction, the PKPA prevents a second state from modifying an initial state's order except in carefully circumscribed situations. This presumption of continuing and exclusive jurisdiction discourages dissatisfied parents from seeking new custody orders from a second state. Differently stated, the statutory presumption encourages parents to concentrate their energies on presenting all evidence about their child's best interests in the courts of a single state, ordinarily the court which entered the initial custody decree.

The PKPA's relatively simple criteria for identifying the one state with custody jurisdiction must be applied by state courts themselves when they are asked to resolve a child custody dispute. The PKPA quite simply preempts conflicting state court methods for ascertaining custody jurisdiction. In addition, this circuit has already joined three others in recognizing that the PKPA creates federal question jurisdiction in the lower federal courts to resolve interstate custody disputes whenever conflicting custody decrees have issued in violation of the Act. Hickey v. Baxter, 800 F.2d 430 (4th Cir.1986). See also McDougald v. Jenson, 786 F.2d 1465 (11th Cir.1986); Heartfield v. Heartfield, 749 F.2d 1138 (5th Cir.1985); Flood v. Braaten, 727 F.2d 303 (3d Cir.1984). But see Thompson v. Thompson, 798 F.2d 1547 (9th Cir.1986). By empowering federal courts to act "as a referee between conflicting state custody decrees," and by providing relatively straightforward criteria for testing conflicting assertions of jurisdiction, the PKPA permits federal courts to grant declaratory and injunctive relief on the jurisdictional dispute without reassessing the merits of any particular state's custody determination. Hickey, 800 F.2d at 431.

III

As the district court correctly recognized, application of the PKPA to this type of dispute is relatively simple. The governing principle of the PKPA appears in Sec. 1738A(a), which provides that "authorities of every state shall enforce according to its terms, and shall not modify ... any child custody determination made consistently with the provisions of this section by a court of another state." (Emphasis...