By Alabama Public Radio
Montgomery AL – The Alabama Supreme Court handed down a near unanimous ruling late last week concerning a child custody case. However, one of the justices disagreed with the majority, saying the decision restricts the mother's religious rights. The ruling upheld a lower court decision last Friday to grant William Mashburn custody of his daughter. Mashburn lives in Madison County and has been divorced from Laura Snider since May 1997, when their daughter was about six months old. Snider originally had custody. She later re-married, became a member of a conservative Baptist denomination and moved to a rural area of Indiana to perform missionary work. However, Mashburn sued for custody and won in 2002 after a lower court determined the child had been beaten and alienated from her family. Eight of Alabama's nine Supreme Court justices upheld the ruling. But Justice Tom Parker dissented, saying the decision to remove the child from her mother restricted the mother's right to teach her child how to worship God. Parker took issue with the way the majority of the court viewed the mother's strong religious convictions.