There has been a lot of talk last year about out of control judges who seem to make their own laws on the spot and don't care about justice. One article I read recently really makes me question the sanity of certain judges.
The article is at http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/breaking_news/13553455.htm
The case deals with family law, where a man divorced his wife and ended up having to pay $1200 in child support. So far, so good. Two years later, one of his relatives looked at the picture and pointed out that the kid doesn't look even close to him. Sure enough, a DNA test confirmed it. This happened when the child was 5 yrs old.
Not surprisingly, the man sued for fraud and to have the payments stopped. What was surprising was that the court ruled AGAINST the husband citing the statute of limitation and ducking the issue of fraud. More below the fold...
For the sake of the record, I don't disagree with the idea of child support. Raising a child is a major expense, and whoever gains custody will need financial assistance. Unfortunately, the current system doesn't always work as it should.
This is a pretty ugly situation. DNA testing and other technlogy made a lot of old laws and precents essentially obsolete. As far as I understand, the courts typically presume that a child born in wedlock was conceived by the married partners, and those partners are the legal parents. During those days, I suspect it was done to err on the side of caution when parentage could not be proven conclusively. DNA testing, of course, made proving paternity inexpensive and near bullet-proof. There might be some exceptions if the biological father is closely related to the husband.
Personally, I don't agree with dismissing the case simply because the ex-husband didn't discover that he wasn't the father for a few years. He might've had suspicions for years, but I just can't blame the guy for not being suspicious enough to arrange a DNA test at birth or at the time of divorce. As the old saying goes, "You can fool most people some of the time, and some people most of the time." It's not a crime to be in the second category. I guess that one lesson in this story is that any divorcing family is strongly advised to do paternity testing. He might avoided the whole mess if he did that.
Personally, what really p***ed me off is that the bonehead judge did not at all seem to care that fraud had occured, not to mention several instances of perjury when the paperwork was filed.
As part of her ruling, Judge Carole Y. Taylor of the Fourth District Court of Appeal in West Palm Beach acknowledged that Richard Parker might feel victimized by the court's ruling. But she said the child's needs are paramount.
Dear feminist quack of a judge: As far as I am aware, there are no laws (except the ones you are making up on the fly) that permit crimes to be committed in the interest of a child's needs. If a poor and desperate minority father went out and knocked off a couple of liquor stores to pay for food to feed his five children, would you dismiss the robbery because children need to eat, and the child's needs trump other laws? Something tells me the poor sap would be looking at 20 to life in your "court" instead of a pat on the back.