Rhode Island news | projo.com | The Providence Journal

« Grand jury: Fatal shooting by Pawtucket police justified | Today | Update: Explosion's cause tracked to truck's water tank »

January 18, 2008

High court stays out of dispute over custody case blog

PROVIDENCE -- The state Supreme Court is refusing to review or halt a Family Court order that told a state agency to “advise” a retired minister to stop publishing a blog “as it pertains” to two children involved in a divorce and custody case.

The Rev. Anne Grant, who heads the Parenting Project based at the Mathewson Street United Methodist Church in Providence, had asked the high court to overrule Family Court Judge John A. Mutter, saying his order violated her constitutional rights to due process and freedom of speech.

But the state Department of Children Youth and Families urged the Supreme Court to reject Ms. Grant’s requests, saying that Mutter did not order Ms. Grant to do anything and that the case of “Sara Doe” and “Mary Doe” was “protected by several levels of confidentiality.”

In a one-sentence order released today, the Supreme Court said, “The petition for writ of certiorari and petitioner’s motion to stay are denied.”

Andrew J. Johnson, DCYF’s deputy chief legal counsel, said the agency is glad the Supreme Court ruled the way they did, and he expects similar issues to be litigated in the future.

“We felt all along we had acted in an appropriate manner at the direction of the Rhode Island Family Court,” Johnson said. “As we move forward in technology and the Internet is used more and more, these issues will undoubtedly go before courts more and more, and we in society and the courts will have to balance the privacy rights of the children versus the First Amendment rights of freedom of speech.”

Grant referred questions to Thomas R. Bender, a Providence lawyer representing her in the case.

Bender noted that in saying it wouldn’t hear the matter at this time, the Supreme Court did not address the merits of the case. “We can only speculate as to why they did not want to hear it,” he said. “The most reasonable explanation is that because DCYF acknowledged the order wasn’t specifically addressed to her, it didn’t have any impact on her, and therefore it wasn’t necessary for the court to address it.”

-- Journal staff writer Edward Fitzpatrick

Bender said he filed the petition in hopes of clarifying the situation and ensuring no one would try to use Mutter’s order to hold Ms. Grant in contempt of court if she continued to publish the blog. “All the court needed to do was add a paragraph to the effect that ‘We are not taking this up at this time because the order doesn’t require Anne Grant to do anything,’ but they declined to do that,” he said.

So now, Bender said, he will probably advise Ms. Grant to continue to publish the blog and to comment on the case while avoiding photographs or information that would identify the children. “If another party asks to hold her in contempt for that, we’ll have to go to court and argue that the order was not specifically addressed to her and the court did not have any jurisdiction over her,” he said.

Ms. Grant had used the blog — www.custodyscam.blogspot.com — to criticize DCYF and others involved in the case, saying they’d used a “bogus theory” to take a mother’s two daughters from her and to send one of the sisters to live with the father — after the father had been accused of sexually abusing the girl. The blog had decried reliance on parental alienation syndrome, a theory which the child psychologist Richard A. Gardner developed “to describe his clinical impressions of cases he believed involved false allegations of child abuse,” Bender has said.

DCYF has said that while the blog used pseudonyms for the girls, it included the children’s photographs, diary entries and medical information, and it repeated the sexual abuse claim that a DCYF hearing officer had deemed “unfounded.”

At DCYF’s request, Mutter issued a decree on Aug. 17, saying: “DCYF, as the temporary custodian of the children, is to advise Anne Grant, author of www.custodyscam.blogspot.com, to remove any and all written and pictorial information pertaining to the children in the above matter, from the inception of publication to the present and henceforth, and to cease publication of the blog as it pertains to these children.”

Posted by Mike McKinney at 5:17 PM | Permalink

January 18, 2008

High court stays out of dispute over custody case blog

Comments

Post a comment