Where I used to work there was an illegal alien who used someone else’s SS# and had to pay his child support or be fired.
How can this be? Did he have an attorney? Did they do DNA testing which would have showed who the biological father is? This seems to bizarre that somebody would go to jail over this.
So the guy is a dirty dog. Doesn't mean he should be forced to support another man's bastard.
Petitions he filed for DNA testing were opposed by the court's domestic relations officials and denied by the judge.
Make DNA testing mandatory.
In May 2007, the paternity order against Walter Sharpe was overturned after the girl's mother and grandmother failed to show up to a court hearing. But the judge ruled in October that Walter Sharpe was not entitled to compensation.
Make compensation mandatory.
Family courts and juvenile courts can be hell. Filled with bias and Catch-22's.
When Walter Sharpe received the certified letter on Feb. 6, 2001, he knew the complaint for child support was a mistake.
Andre Sharpe had a different date of birth, a different Social Security number and different previous addresses.
Andre Sharpe also had an 11-year-old daughter with a woman in Harrisburg, and Walter Sharpe knew he had been to Harrisburg only once, to register a car. He also knew he hadn't fathered a child to a woman named Terri Jones on that trip.
So he ignored it.
Big mistake.
The letter required Andre Sharpe to attend a Domestic Relations conference on March 6, 2001.
On May 29, 2001, since neither man attended the conference, Dauphin County Judge Scott A. Evans, as required by law, issued a ruling finding that Walter Andre Sharpe was the father.
A month later, Domestic Relations entered an order requiring him to pay $447 a month support along with $5,730 in arrears.
When the agency attached his wages at the trash company J.P. Mascaro & Sons, Walter Sharpe told his boss there was a mistake. He then received a notice from Domestic Relations telling him to come in to verify his claim of mistaken identity.
Instead of fixing the error, the office changed the personal information on the case to match his, Tanner, his attorney, said in court documents.
continued at http://www.pennlive.com/news/patriotnews/index.ssf?/base/news/1226722211104830.xml&coll=1
Don’t we all? Around here it’s called welfare. And you go to jail if you don’t pay it [taxes] too.
A note to remember. If you are going to get separated and/or divorced, do yourself a favor and work out child support payments without a lawyer or the state court system if possible. When myself and my ex split we worked out something that was fair. Let’s just say the court system was not happy with us. We both got letters from the state looking to be the go-between for us. Multiple letters. I know sometimes it’s impossible to work something out with an ex, but if you can, you will save yourself a big headache and maybe some money too.
In his case, he got a letter from the DA of Los Angeles informing him that he owed $60,000 in back child support, and they sent him payment coupons (he did not live in LA, but did live in California).
The first thing he did was call the people who sent the letter. He found out that they only matched his first and last name on DMV records, but not the different middle names because the DMV search didn't allow for that. They had the true father's SSN, but didn't match on that, either.
My friend was advised to call the LA police and report this as a mistaken identity, which he did. They asked that he fax his drivers license to them to prove his identity, which he did. That seemed to resolve the problem.
Then, a few months later, he received another letter, this time from Trenton, NJ. It seems that the mother lives there, and initially reported the deliquency to the local NJ officials, who mistakenly found the California name. When California initially reported the "find" back to NJ, NJ Family Services then sent an additional arrears notice for $25,000 more.
The bottom line is that my friend's initial contacting of the parties cleared the whole thing up, unlike this story where the guy just ignored it. The postscript to this is that a month later, my friend got some collection calls for unpaid credit cards from the same deadbeat dad, and had to clear that up, too.
-PJ
There is something more here we are not being told. Would not the mother know that this was the wrong man? If he didn’t even know the woman how could the child be his?
It makes no sense that a judge would not allow a DNA test to be done. At the end of the article did it say that the girl lived with him now? Strange. It would take some overzealous prosecutors and and a very idiotic judge for this to have ever occurred.
The real problem seems to be that he ignored the initial summons (and then didn't bother to fight the garnishment for years). Our legal system is not friendly toward people who fail to contest a claim in a timely manner. In a sense it makes sense--you can't have people ignoring suits and then relitigating them on their own time--but to irrevocably declare someone the father and then send him to jail seems to be a little much.
This is what government does, and this is why there is a 2nd Amendment.
I need a new scorecard. I messed mine all up trying to follow this story . . .