LAKE CHARLES, La. (Legal Newsline) - A Louisiana man is the rightful plaintiff in a lawsuit over the death of his mentally disabled daughter even though he didn’t visit her for more than 40 years, a Louisiana appeals court ruled in a decision hinging upon the meaning of “abandonment” under the state’s civil code.
The unpublished decision by Louisiana’s Third Circuit Court of Appeal drew a lengthy dissent by the court’s chief judge, who said the majority turned Louisiana law “on its head” by ruling in favor of Stanford Barnett and against his children in the lawsuit against the facility where his daughter Lesli was institutionalized.
Barnett sued Arc of Acadiana in December 2018 after Lesli, aged 54, slipped down in a wheelchair and was strangled by the seatbelt. A month later, two of Lesli’s siblings, James Barnett and Collette Barnett Neely, filed a similar lawsuit against the nursing home, claiming they were the proper parties to recover damages for her death.
Under the Louisiana Civil Code, spouses, parents and children have the primary right of recovery. Siblings can only sue if the others are dead. But the plaintiffs argued another provision of the Civil Code deems parents “not to have survived” if they abandon their minor children. The code further defines abandonment as leaving a child for at least a year and failing to provide “care and support.”
Lesli was one of six children to Stanford and Helen Barnett. She developed meningitis as a toddler and suffered severe mental damage requiring her to be institutionalized. Her parents separated when Lesli was three and while Stanford testified he regularly visited his other children and paid $240 a month in support for the children, he said Helen never told him where Lesli was institutionalized and he never visited her.
“Based on the evidence, we cannot find that Stanford abandoned Lesli,” the appeals court ruled in an opinion by Judge D. Kent Savoie.
“Stanford asserted his visitation rights and continued to be a part of his children’s lives,” the court went on. “We can assume that had Lesli not been institutionalized in a mental health facility, Stanford would have continued to visit her alongside his other children.”
Chief Judge Sylvia Cooks dissented, in a response three times longer than the majority opinion. She said the record was “replete with much evidence of Stanford’s abandonment of Lesli for many years during her minority and throughout the entirety of her adult life.”
“According to Stanford’s own testimony he felt Lesli had been `killed’ when her meningitis rendered her severely handicapped,” the judge wrote.
Collette testified Stanford stopped paying child support when she turned 18, almost a year before Lesli reached her majority, the dissenting justice wrote, making it clear “Lesli’s age was not a factor in his consideration.”
“Stanford’s intent to abandon Lesli came from his own mouth when he spoke with Collette and bolsters his own testimony that he considered Lesli as `killed’ after she was left debilitated by her disease,” wrote the justice, using italics for emphasis.