An American Indian child being raised by her biological father should not have been taken from her adoptive parents, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday, saying that a federal law designed to keep Indian families together did not apply in the case.
The 5-4 decision reversed a ruling by the South Carolina Supreme Court, finding that the case represented an exception to the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, a federal law designed to make it difficult for Indian children to be removed from their families. That landmark legislation effectively ended the practice of taking Indian children from their homes and placing them in boarding schools and in non-Indian foster-care facilities.
The court’s majority held Tuesday that the case - Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, No. 12-399 - did not involve removing a child from an Indian home because the girl’s father had renounced his parental rights before the child was born and the child’s birth mother, a Mexican-American, had agreed to allow the South Carolina couple to adopt the girl.
Several months after the child’s birth, the biological father, Dusten Brown, an enrolled member of the Cherokee tribe, changed his mind and sought custody of his daughter. He said he had not realized that his former fiancee was going to put the child up for adoption. The girl was in the process of being adopted by Matt and Melanie Capobianco, a white couple who raised her for 27 months before South Carolina courts ruled in favor of Brown.
The decision means the case will return to the South Carolina courts, though it is unclear when, or if, the child will be returned to the Capobianco family.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote the court’s majority opinion and was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan dissented.
In other business, the Supreme Court set new limits on local governments’ ability to require property owners to make a payment in exchange for a land-use permit.
The court ruled 5-4 in favor of a Florida man who sought in 1994 to develop part of almost 15 acres he owned in the Orlando area. Because some of the property was classified as a wetland, the local water-management district said that to get a permit, Coy Koontz must develop a smaller amount of land or pay to make improvements on a separate piece of land owned by the district.
Koontz sued for damages, saying the agency’s demand violated the Constitution’s rule that governments can’t take private property without paying fair compensation.
The Supreme Court ruled in two cases in 1987 and 1994 that when governments require property owners seeking land-use permits to give up other land in exchange, such as by granting a conservation easement, there must be a connection and “rough proportionality” between the land use and the government’s demand.
In Tuesday’s decision, the Supreme Court said that standard also applies when the government demands a financial payment in exchange for a land-use permit.
Alito’s majority opinion was joined by Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy and Thomas. Dissenting were Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan.
The court ordered the case returned to Florida courts to determine whether the water district owes financial damages to Koontz’s estate, which is being represented by his son.
The case is Koontz v. St. John’s River Water Management District, 11-1447.
Information for this article was contributed by Timothy Williams and Dan Frosch of The New York Times and by Laurie Asseo of Bloomberg News.
Front Section, Pages 5 on 06/26/2013