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But legally he is in the right, and as a conservative believer in the rule of law that is what I care about.

So stop yelling at me already. I agree with you. Yes, legally the Smileys don't have a leg to stand on that I can see.

However, "kidnapping" is too simple a term for what actually happened. From what you have posted here, the Smileys did all they could do in good faith to have the child, and it's just too bad that the courts are willing to support nuts and flakes purely on the basis of biology.

For Michael's sake it turned out well (discounting the distress he's surely going through now, but at least now he's an adult and can be reasonably expected to cope with it), but it was done illegally, and therefore a penalty must be assessed.

As I said, though, I hope the Smileys are convicted but given a very light sentence. Therefore both Justice and Mercy are served.

I'm not yelling at you, just trying to make my point with a certain degree of rigor. Anyway that post was directed at tallhappy (who was yelling, more or less) not you. I still don't see how being somewhat irresponsible in their early 20s permanently qualifies Gardner and Russini as "nuts and flakes." It's important not to confuse the legal issue of whether the adoption question was correctly decided with the issue of whether they did wrong in defying the adoption decision. We agree on the latter, but you seem to have misgivings on the former. You have yet to present evidence that this was an emotional, "liberal" decision on the part of the judges rather than a clear-cut case of who had the law on their side. Given that it went through two courts, that is what I'm going to believe until I see solid evidence otherwise. You seem to be presuming that there was an ironclad agreement and Gardner and Russini weaseled their way out of it somehow. In reality adoptions go through several stages and there are safeguards in the law to protect the rights of fathers and of vulnerable women. Pressure tactics do happen - why do you think the birthparents rights movement is so militant? You cannot dismiss this point as "emotional blahblahblah" unless you have the court documents at hand and can show me where emotions trumped law. And I just totally fail to see how having a child out of wedlock, which millions of people do every day, makes them so much worse than the couple who conspired to transport a child across state lines, commit identity fraud, and lie to him about his origins for 20 years. Kidnapping is a legal technical term and what they did fits the bill.