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SUPREME COURT OF GEORGIA
Case No. S24C0850
September 17, 2024
The Honorable Supreme Court met pursuant to adjournment.
The following order was passed:
HOWARD RUSSELL YNTEMA v. LEAH SMITH.
The Supreme Court today denied the petition for certiorari in
this case.
All the Justices concur.
Court of Appeals Case No. A23A1660
SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF GEORGIA
Clerk’s Office, Atlanta
I certify that the above is a true extract from the
minutes of the Supreme Court of Georgia.
Witness my signature and the seal of said court hereto
affixed the day and year last above written.
, Clerk
PETERSON, Presiding Justice, concurring.
I concur fully in the denial of Howard Yntema’s petition for a
writ of certiorari. Although there is gravity in whether the order of
the trial court prohibiting a broad range of speech by a variety of
people was permitted by the federal and state constitutional rights
to free speech, Yntema consented to that order (and so waived
whatever rights the order might otherwise have violated). But Kitty,
Yntema’s new wife, was not a party to the litigation, and did not
consent to the order.
It seems to me that Kitty’s challenges to the order — both on
free speech grounds and on due process grounds as a nonparty —
are significant. And I have serious doubts about aspects of the Court
of Appeals’s resolution of those challenges. 1 But Kitty has not filed
1 As to the due process issue, the case law on which the court relied for a
trial court’s authority to hold a nonparty in contempt does not seem to apply.
The Court of Appeals concluded that the consent order applied to Kitty merely
because she had notice of it. Notice is a necessary condition, but is not sufficient alone. The sole case the Court of Appeals cited in which a contempt order was
upheld involved a nonparty taking extraordinary efforts to frustrate orders of
the trial court, and then being held in contempt for those efforts. See Wilkerson
v. Tolbert, 239 Ga. 702 (238 SE2d 338) (1977). The Court of Appeals cited no
decision of our Court empowering trial courts to include nonparties within the
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a petition for a writ of certiorari, and this is not the sort of case
warranting the exercise of our certiorari power sua sponte. And, in
scope of an order like the one here absent some previous effort to impede the
trial court’s lawful authority.
And as to the free speech issue, the Court of Appeals properly recognized
that at least some of the trial court’s order was constitutionally impermissible.
But it applied a decision of our Court for the proposition that it is
constitutionally permissible for a trial court to require parties in a divorce
proceeding “to refrain from making derogatory remarks about the other before
the children.” See Maloof v. Maloof, 231 Ga. 811, 812 (6) (204 SE2d 162) (1974).
That statement in Maloof cited no authority, Maloof has never been cited by
our Court, and the statement was dicta, given the Court’s holding that the
order at issue was not permissible. And, in any event, Maloof’s conclusory dicta
was limited by its terms to parties. It is not at all clear that broad prior
restraints such as those here (which extended far beyond statements made in
the presence of the children) would satisfy the constitutional rights to free
speech. See, e.g., K. Gordon Murray Prods. v. Floyd, 217 Ga. 784, 790-793 (2)
(125 SE2d 207) (1962) (holding that prior restraint that was permissible under
United States Constitution was impermissible under Georgia Constitution);
see also Shak v. Shak, 144 NE3d 274, 279-280 (Mass. 2020) (considering
nondisparagement order in divorce proceeding under First Amendment and
holding that, although “the State has a compelling interest in protecting
children from being exposed to disparagement between their parents,” order
was impermissible prior restraint because no case-specific showing was made
“linking communications by either parent to any grave, imminent harm to the
child” (citations and punctuation omitted)); Yanez v. Sanchez, 548 P3d 341, 345
(Ariz. Ct. App. 2024) (while considering First Amendment challenge to order
imposing speech restrictions in domestic case, observing “nearly every state to
have tackled the issue requires proof of actual or threatened physical or
emotional harm to a child” and invalidating order due to lack of record
“evidence of actual or threatened physical or emotional harm to the child”)
(citing cases).
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any event, as the Court of Appeals rightly noted, its review was very
limited given that the trial court order on appeal is interlocutory. It
may be that Kitty can more persuasively raise constitutional
challenges before the trial court on remand; although the Court of
Appeals’s narrow decision will be law of the case in future
proceedings before the trial court and the Court of Appeals as to the
issues actually decided, it does not prevent either court from
considering broader issues on remand, and does not prevent our
consideration of an eventual cert petition even as to the issues
already decided by the Court of Appeals.
I am authorized to state that Justice Warren and Justice
LaGrua join in this concurral.
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