6-Year Paternity Suit Limit Voided : Justices Rule Illegitimate Children Under 18 May Seek Aid

The Supreme Court, ruling that illegitimate children under 18 may seek support payments from fathers who have abandoned them, threw out a Pennsylvania law Monday that barred such claims after a child has turned 6 years old.

The ruling, combined with new tests that can establish paternity with 99% accuracy, will give mothers of older children who were born out of wedlock another chance to get support money from fathers.

“We believe this (decision) gives a second chance to thousands of children who once had child support payments barred by a statute of limitations,” said Diane Dodson, an attorney for the Women’s Legal Defense Fund. “If the mother was told it was too late to get support, she can now go to court to reopen the matter, establish the paternity of the father and get child support.”

Large Number Affected

The lawyers who worked on the case said that they did not know how many children would be affected by the ruling but that the number is likely to be large.

The Census Bureau says that in 1986 there were more than 2 million mothers with illegitimate children, only 370,000 of whom were receiving child support. Among those not getting support were the children of 85,000 mothers who were unable to establish paternity.

In 1984, Congress required all the states to give illegitimate children until age 18 to establish paternity for child support purposes. But the federal law did not make clear whether the requirement would be retroactive, and the Pennsylvania courts refused to apply its law, which took effect in 1986, to illegitimate children born before then.

Pittsburgh Case

In the case before the Supreme Court, Cherlyn Clark filed a child support claim in 1983 in a Pittsburgh court on behalf of her 10-year-old daughter, Tiffany. She named Gene Jeter as the father, and a court-ordered test showed with 99.3% probability that Jeter was indeed Tiffany’s father.

The state courts, citing a six-year state time limit that had been in effect before 1986 on such paternity actions, told Clark that it was too late to seek support from Jeter.

In a unanimous decision (Clark vs. Jeter, 87-5565), the Supreme Court reversed that ruling.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said that Pennsylvania had violated Tiffany Clark’s constitutional right to “equal protection of the laws” because it treated her differently from a legitimate child. Legitimate children may seek child support at any time until age 18, while illegitimate children like Tiffany were barred from seeking such support after age 6, the court noted.

New Genetic Tests

At one time, judges in paternity suits had to rely entirely on the testimony of the people involved and for that reason many states said that such suits had to be filed within a year or two of the child’s birth. But as the court pointed out, that reason vanished when new genetic tests were developed to establish paternity with equal accuracy years after the fact.

“This is a case of technology overtaking the law,” Dodson said. “Those laws may have made sense 25 years ago, but they don’t make sense today.”

California state attorneys said that the ruling would have no impact there, because the state has not set a time limit on paternity suits. “As far as I am aware, we have not had a statute of limitations in paternity actions,” said Josanna Berkow, statewide coordinator of child support in the attorney general’s office.

Other Rulings

In other actions, the court:

--Ruled unanimously that groups seeking to put initiatives on the ballot may pay signature gatherers (Meyer vs. Grant, 87-920). The justices struck down a Colorado law that made it a crime to pay solicitors to help collect signatures for ballot measures, concluding that it violated the free speech rights of the political groups.

California and 22 other states allow for enacting laws through ballot measures, but only three--Colorado, Washington and Nebraska--prohibited payments to signature gatherers.

--Agreed to decide whether the federal government may require railroad workers to take a drug test when their train has been involved in an accident. In February, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco struck down the federal railroad testing program, concluding that it violated the rights of train workers because it did not require any evidence that they were impaired by drugs or alcohol.

Public Employees

The high court earlier had said that it would consider the constitutionality of mandatory drug testing for public employees during its fall term and on Monday it agreed to consider the railroad case (Burnley vs. Railway Labor Executives Assn., 87-1555) at the same time.

Transportation Secretary James H. Burnley IV, whose office administers the testing program, said that he is confident the 9th Circuit ruling would be overturned next year.

“If we can constitutionally test jockeys to protect the public confidence in the race-track betting system, we surely must be able to test railroad operating personnel to protect human lives,” Burnley said.

--Ordered a new sentencing hearing for two Death Row inmates in Maryland and Oklahoma. In the Maryland case (Mills vs. Maryland, 87-5367), the court said by a 5-4 vote that the jury may not have understood that it could consider all mitigating evidence before deciding whether a convicted killer got death or life imprisonment.

The justices also concluded that part of Oklahoma’s capital punishment law is so vague that jurors had little guidance as to whether the murderer should be imprisoned or executed (Maynard vs. Cartwright, 87-519).