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. Legislation to combat paternity fraud has been
introduced into the legislatures of several other states,
including Vermont, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Georgia.
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?"
Glenn Sacks' columns have appeared in
the Los Angeles Times,
the Houston Chronicle,
the San Francisco Chronicle,
the Philadelphia Inquirer,
the San Diego Union-Tribune,
the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
the Los Angeles Daily News,
the Salt Lake City Tribune,
the Memphis Commercial-Appeal,
and the Washington Times.
He invites readers to visit his
website at www.GlennJSacks.com.
