When Larry
Nicholson went to court after receiving a child support order, he knew something wasn't
right.
"I
looked at the child," he says. "The child is white. I'm black. Now I'm not
an expert in genetics, but I knew something had to be wrong."
It sounds
like an easy problem which any reasonable judge would remedy with one pound of the gavel,
right?
"I got
a DNA test that excluded me as the father," Nicholson says. "The judge refused
to consider the DNA evidence--not to mention the obvious evidence right in front of
him--and made a child support order. He said that the time period for challenges to
paternity had run out. But nobody had ever served me--I knew nothing about it until
I got a bill saying that I owed support and that I was $75,000 in arrears. If I had
known, I would have contested it in a second."
Nicholson
now pays over 40% of his take home pay in child support and arrearages, and will be paying
for the next 13 years. Meanwhile he has a wife and a daughter of his own to support.
Nicholson's
ordeal has occurred in part because, under current state law, unwed men named in default
judgments have only six months to contest an order assigning paternity. Other men
faced with erroneous paternity judgments signed paternity declarations under the mistaken
belief that they were the fathers, and had only two years to contest the ensuing judgment.
The
Paternity Justice Act of 2002 (AB 2240), recently introduced into the California State
Assembly by Assemblyman Rod Wright (D-Los Angeles), is designed to remedy these injustices
by extending the period during which judgments of paternity may be challenged through
genetic testing. The bill requires courts to vacate paternity judgments which are shown to
be erroneous, thus relieving falsely identified fathers of further child support.
Erroneously
identified fathers often face a number of obstacles. For one, they are often misled
into believing that they are the children's biological fathers. Others, like Nicholson,
have not been served or notified, and are not even aware that they have been named the
father of a child until their wages are garnished. In both cases, the time period
under which they can contest paternity has often run out before the men have become aware
of reasons to challenge it. In the case of default judgments, men generally bear the
burden of proof and often find it difficult to convince the courts that they were never
served or notified.
How many
men are victims of mistakes or fraud in regard to paternity? Of the nearly 300,000 cases
evaluated each year in the United States, roughly 30% exclude the tested individual as the
biological father. Even blood typing examinations taken decades ago showed that at a bare
minimum 10% of the fathers who signed their babies' birth certificates were unknowingly
claiming paternity of children who weren't theirs. Carnell Smith, the founder of US
Citizens Against Paternity Fraud, estimates that as many as 20% of all fathers are victims
of paternity fraud.
Paternity
fraud victims' stories often provoke disbelief. For example, four years ago Air
Force Master Sergeant Ray Jackson was divorced by his wife. Soon afterwards, he
discovered that the three children born during their marriage had, in fact, been the
product of three different extramarital affairs. Jackson's ex-wife has disappeared
with the children, and Jackson is still paying half his income to support children who
aren't his and whom he'll probably never be allowed to see.
Los Angeles
area technical instructor Bert Riddick, along with his wife and three children, fell from
the middle-class to homelessness and welfare dependency within a few years of being
falsely identified by an old girlfriend as the father of her child. Until going into
hiding last year, Riddick was paying 60% of his net income in child support and arrears to
the well-heeled ex-girlfriend who defrauded him. He says:
"The
courts decide that I have to pay the child support because it is ‘in the best
interest of the child.' But I wonder which child they're talking about--the child whom
tests have shown is not mine, or the three children who are mine and who I have to feed
and clothe every day. Is taking half of daddy's money for 18 years in their best
interest?" |
