Posted on 09/30/2009 7:03:18 AM PDT by RogerFGay
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently ran articles on a case that should outrage any fair-minded person. Georgia man Frank Hatley was in a Cook County jail for over a year for failure to pay child support. However, DNA tests proved that the child in question was not biologically his.He had never been married to or even cohabiting with the boy’s mother. The two had a brief affair and when the mother had the baby in 1987, she told Hatley that the baby was his.
A couple of years later, the mother applied for and received public assistance. The state demanded reimbursement from Hatley who agreed to make those payments believing the boy was in fact his son. In 2000, DNA tests showed that Hatley was not the biological father. A court ordered that Hatley be relieved of any obligations for future support of the boy. However, this order did not relieve him of the back payments owed when it had been assumed he was the father so Hatley continued making those payments from the money he earned at his job of unloading charcoal grills from shipping containers.
In 2007, Hatley was laid off from his job. Unable to afford housing, he lived out of his car. Nevertheless, he continued to make child support payments to the state out of his unemployment benefits.
However, he fell behind in his payments, was found in contempt of court and jailed. He was recently released because he is indigent. Soon after his release, a judge relieved him from any obligation to pay the support on which he was in arrears – but which he never should have owed in the first place.
It is good that Hatley is free and relieved of any future financial obligations in the case. However, this does not rectify the injustice that he has suffered. It does not return the money he already paid out of his extremely limited funds nor does it make up for the thirteen months he spent in jail.
The Hatley case illustrates a crying need for an overhaul of the child support system. Firstly, there is the fact that poverty is not a defense against the failure to pay child support. Even if the child had been his, the facts are that Hatley was unable to adequately support himself and did not have the money to support the child. However, the law took a jobless, penniless man living out of his car to jail for not making child support payments. This is a modern day version of the old Victorian horror of debtor’s prison.
People should not go to jail in 21st Century America just for being poor – but Frank Hatley did and so have many others.
Of course, the case began because of a misidentification in paternity. Many observers would criticize the mother as a liar and see her as someone who should be prosecuted for what is often called “paternity fraud.” I do not. The mother was there at the time of the conception but it is unlikely that she was taking notes. Human memory is extremely fallible and this fallibility is exacerbated by the emotionality of questions involving sex and reproduction. Given these truths, a DNA test should be routinely taken before paternity is assigned. If the DNA test is negative, a man could still voluntarily agree to assume the role of the father – with the financial responsibilities incurred as a result – but it would be his free and informed choice.
That we need to fix this system is obvious when a man has been treated as a criminal and jailed for failing to provide money he does not have for a child who is not his.
He spent thousands of dollars to defend himself, and the court ruled she did wrong. They reduced his debt down to $12,000 and his ex walked away without as much as a slap on the wrist.
BTW, this was in California
A school janitor in Texas was convicted of murder. About 10 years later DNA tests proved he was innocent. He was released from prison and immediately hit up for back child support.
I think what they are trying to say is that she had more than one partner in the time that it was possible to conceive this child.
"Are there no prisons? And the workhouses, are they in full operation?"
Seems to me that Dickens was a prophet of 21st Century Amerika.
I have a brother in law who paid about 80 percent of his child support bill for two kids out in Texas back in the seventies and eighties. He thought he was all paid up, but when he applied for his social security a couple of years ago (He is 65, kids are in their late thirties and early forties), the state of Texas started witholding half of his social security check. He has had the same address for thirty years, filed his income taxes every year, and that 20% he didn’t know about went from about 10k to over 100k in interest and penalties. Nice little nest egg and her hubby...think this guy is like number 4.
nest egg for his ex and her hubby..Memo, proof read..
There are some here that will advocate on behalf of the non-father continuing payments to a woman who lied to the authorities in order to get him pay child support. Supposedly so the child doesn’t suffer.
I could never understand though how they can justify forcing someone into involuntary economic servitude for a crime they didn’t commit.
He should get ACORN to help him sue the baby momma. ...poor guy.
Why would the author leave out the mother’s name from the article?
I agree 100%.
Now he has a life sentence...
That is just sad. This society is being all screwed up by the leftist culture.
I dunno anymore. I get she didn’t think to put up a sign-in sheet.
“I disagree, however, that anyone (mothers or fathers) should be “let off the hook” as to their support obligations due to financial struggles.”
If its a bona fide financial struggle, like layoff, unexpected inability to earn the same wage due to circumstances beyond control, why not? If the parents were still married, those kids have to understand that the financial picture has changed, so why not these divorced kids.
And face it,, child support today, very often leaves a dad destitute while a white collar mom prospers. Why is a dad, spending his money to provide a good life for the child at *his home* as the mther does at hers, not “supporting” his child. Label it correctly, in truth, it’s usually ex-wife support.
I know all these women bankers, doctors, dentists, sailors, politicians, judges, fighter and airline pilots will probably get a fainting case of the vapors now, but thats how i see it. lol
“I could never understand though how they can justify forcing someone into involuntary economic servitude for a crime they didn’t commit.”
Sheesh! The government routinely forces me and you and every other tax-paying working stiff into involuntary servitude to pay for these women’s offspring. They justify it, as they do all taxes, at the point of a gun.
“Actually, that doesn’t always necessarily equate with knowing who the father of the baby is”
True, but how does that add up to forcing someone to pay when you arent sure?
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