What you need to know about the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn an Alabama Supreme Court ruling to not recognize a lesbian mother’s adoption. (Claritza Jimenez/The Washington Post)

What you need to know about the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn an Alabama Supreme Court ruling to not recognize a lesbian mother’s adoption. (Claritza Jimenez/The Washington Post)

The Supreme Court on Monday overturned an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that said the state should not recognize a lesbian mother’s adoption of three children in neighboring Georgia.

The justices reversed the state court’s decision without scheduling the case for oral arguments and full briefing. The high court said the Alabama court had ignored long-standing precedent that state courts must recognize legitimate rulings by courts in other states.

The case represents the kinds of legal issues that are arising in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in June that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry.

In a second unsigned opinion, the court overturned the death sentence of a man who had been on Louisiana’s death row since a conviction in 1998.

In the Alabama case, the justices already had granted a stay request from one of the mothers, identified in court papers as V.L., so that she could visit the children.

[Supreme Court asked to hear lesbian mother’s adoption case]

In a statement provided by her attorneys, V.L. said she was “overjoyed” by the court’s decision.

“I have been my children’s mother in every way for their whole lives,” V.L. said. “I thought that adopting them meant that we would be able to be together always. When the Alabama court said my adoption was invalid and I wasn’t their mother, I didn’t think I could go on. The Supreme Court has done what’s right for my family.”

The Alabama high court said Georgia courts violated their own state laws in granting the adoptions of the children V.L. shared with her former partner, and thus she did not deserve custody or even visitation with the children.

V.L. adopted the children whom her longtime partner, identified in court papers as E.L., delivered after becoming pregnant from a donor. The couple later broke up in Alabama, where they lived.

“The Georgia judgment appears on its face to have been issued by a court with jurisdiction, and there is no established Georgia law to the contrary,” the Supreme Court wrote in the opinion, to which there were no recorded dissents.

“It follows that the Alabama Supreme Court erred in refusing to grant that judgment full faith and credit.”

Lawyers for V.L. had argued that the Alabama decision violated the Constitution’s “full faith and credit” clause, which requires that states respect court judgments, including adoption orders, issued by courts in other states.

Gay rights groups have said legal same-sex marriage will not solve myriad problems for gay parents, particularly those who were raising children together before the legalization of same-sex unions and then split up.

“The Supreme Court’s reversal of Alabama’s unprecedented decision to void an adoption from another state is a victory not only for our client but for thousands of adopted families,” said Cathy Sakimura, family law director at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, who is representing V.L.

“No adoptive parent or child should have to face the uncertainty and loss of being separated years after their adoption just because another state’s court disagrees with the law that was applied in their adoption.”

The case is V.L. v. E.L.

In the Louisiana case, the court decided it did not need further briefing to reverse the murder conviction of Michael Wearry, who was found guilty in the 1998 death of a 16-year-old delivering pizza in a rural area near Baton Rouge.

There was no physical evidence tying Wearry to the murder, and the court’s opinion said that the state’s case, built upon the testimony of others, was a “house of cards.”

The court said prosecutors should have turned over evidence that cast doubt on the credibility of those witnesses, one of whom carried a grudge against Wearry, and said the state did not disclose medical records that would have raised further questions about the incriminating testimony.

Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas dissented from the decision.

Alito wrote that there was “no question” that prosecutors should have turned over the evidence, but “whether the information was sufficient to warrant reversing petitioner’s conviction is another matter.”

Alito said if his colleagues had questions, they should have accepted the case for full briefing and a hearing.

The court’s opinion said the lapses were so glaring that that was not needed.

Any further delay, the opinion said, would mean “forcing Wearry to endure yet more time on Louisiana’s death row in service of a conviction that is constitutionally flawed.”

The case is Wearry v. Cain.