A pair of Colorado grandparents scored a legal victory in the Florida Supreme Court Thursday that will grant them visitation rights with their grandchildren who live in Orange County.
But in their decision, Florida Supreme Court justices specifically said they are not granting visitation rights to any other grandparents, only calling for the enforcement of one prior court order from Colorado.
“It changes nothing with regard to grandparents’ visitation rights in our state,” said attorney Jamie Moses, who represented the mother of the grandchildren in question.
The case involves grandparents seeking visitation rights, like the visits divorced non-custodial parents can arrange with their children.
In Florida, grandparents are not normally entitled to visitation. Courts have ruled that would violate parents’ rights to privacy and child-rearing autonomy under the state constitution, though a 2015 law makes exceptions for rare cases in which both parents are dead, missing or in a vegetative state.
Had the case originated in Florida, justices wrote, giving grandparents visitation rights would have been ruled unconstitutional. But in this case Colorado courts had already ordered visitation, so overruling them would violate the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the U.S. Constitution by failing to respect judicial proceedings in another state.
This case began in 2010 when Ruth Ledoux-Nottingham and her husband, both Colorado residents at the time and parents to two young girls, got a divorce, records show.
In 2011, Ledoux-Nottingham’s husband died in a shooting accident. After his funeral, Ledoux-Nottingham and both daughters moved to Orange County.
Her former husband’s parents, Jennifer and William Downs, still wanted to be involved in the children’s lives, said their attorney, Andrew Windle. They wanted the girls to visit them back in Colorado.
“They don’t have their son anymore, but this is his legacy, this is what he’s left behind,” Windle said. “They promote his legacy and they do everything in their power to stay in these grandkids’ lives.”
The Downs filed motions seeking visitation in Colorado courts, and a judge granted them visitation in 2012. The grandchildren would have to travel to Colorado every year for one week during their winter school vacations and two weeks of their summer vacations.
Back in Florida, Ledoux-Nottingham filed a motion of her own in local courts. As the legal process dragged on the grandparents were allowed to talk to their grandchildren on the phone, but the Colorado-ordered visits did not take place.
The children are now 14 and 8 years old, Windle said.
Though the Florida Supreme Court answered the question of whether Colorado’s court order holds water here, the legal fight is not over. Windle said he and the grandparents are seeking to make up the time they would have spent with the grandchildren since courts ruled in their favor — 28 days. They expect a ruling within the next few months.
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