Dias v. Boone

Michelle Dias adopted a child, M. D., while in a relationship with Abby Boone, who helped raise the child from infancy though she never adopted her. After the couple broke up, Dias cut off contact between Boone and the child in early 2018. In 2019, shortly after Georgia's new Equitable Caregiver Statute took effect, Boone sued for custody and visitation rights as an equitable caregiver, and a Muscogee County superior court eventually granted her joint legal custody and parenting time. Dias appealed, arguing the statute unconstitutionally overrides a parent's fundamental right to raise her own child. The Supreme Court of Georgia found the constitutional questions serious but avoided deciding them. Instead, it ruled that the statute cannot be used to base equitable caregiver status on a parent's conduct that happened before the law existed, because a parent could not have knowingly waived rights she did not yet know were at stake. Since Dias's conduct occurred before July 2019, the statute did not apply, and the custody order was reversed.

The Equitable Caregiver Statute does not authorize courts to grant equitable caregiver status based on a legal parent's conduct that took place before the statute's July 1, 2019 effective date, because such conduct could not have constituted a knowing and voluntary waiver of the parent's constitutional rights, and applying the statute that way would also conflict with presumptions against retroactive legislation.

The ruling limits how Georgia's Equitable Caregiver Statute can be used, protecting parents whose past relationships or caregiving arrangements predate the 2019 law from losing custody rights based on old conduct, while leaving open broader constitutional questions about the statute for future cases.

Judgment reversed

1. The court explained that under the principle of constitutional avoidance, meaning courts should avoid deciding hard constitutional questions when a case can be resolved another way, it would first look for a non-constitutional way to decide the case.
2. It found the Equitable Caregiver Statute raises serious concerns because it may let a court award custody or visitation to someone other than a legal parent without requiring proof that the parent is unfit or that the harm shown is tied to a specific parental decision, unlike Georgia's other custody and visitation laws.
3. The court reasoned that a parent could waive her constitutional parental rights through conduct like fostering a bonded relationship with another adult, but only if that waiver was knowing and voluntary, meaning made with awareness of what she was giving up.
4. Because Dias's caregiving-sharing conduct with Boone occurred entirely before the statute existed in 2019, Dias could not have known this conduct might cost her parental rights, so any waiver could not be knowing and voluntary.
5. Applying the statute to pre-2019 conduct would also amount to retroactive lawmaking, giving old actions new legal consequences, which Georgia law presumes statutes do not do unless the legislature says so clearly, and the Equitable Caregiver Statute contains no such statement.
6. The court also resolved a separate jurisdictional dispute, holding that appeals from equitable caregiver orders are child custody cases that do not require a discretionary application, disagreeing with a recent Court of Appeals decision on that point.

• Equitable Caregiver Statute
• child custody dispute
• parental rights
• same-sex co-parenting
• retroactive law