High Court Rejects Unwed Father’s Plea to Visit Child

The Supreme Court today shattered the hopes of an unwed La Habra, Calif., father seeking to restore a parental relationship with his 7-year-old daughter.

Eight days after hearing arguments in Edward McNamara’s case, the court dismissed his appeal in a one-sentence decision: “The appeal is dismissed for want of a properly presented federal question.”

In his appeal, McNamara contended that his parental rights had been terminated unconstitutionally by San Diego authorities.

The justices had been expected to use his case to decide whether unwed fathers who actively seek custody of their children may be stripped of all parental rights if adoption is deemed in the children’s best interest.

McNamara, who is 42, no longer was seeking custody of his daughter, Katie. He wanted to re-establish a parent-child relationship so he could win visitation rights.

McNamara and Katie’s mother, unidentified in court records, had not seen each other for eight months when Katie was born in 1981. McNamara did not learn of the pregnancy or birth until he was told that Katie, then a month old, had been placed in a foster home awaiting adoption.

He quickly sought custody.

Katie was five months old before a trial was held on McNamara’s custody request, and a California judge ruled that it was in Katie’s best interest to stay with the foster parents with whom she had been living.

In arguments before the justices Nov. 28, McNamara’s lawyer contended that California law unfairly discriminates against unwed fathers by making it more difficult for them to assert their rights as parents.

San Diego County had defended the state’s policy of giving an unwed mother the primary right to decide whether to surrender a child for adoption.

“Biology in and of itself does not create a substantial relationship or create a parental right,” Lloyd Harmon Jr. had argued for the county.

In another case today, the justices saved the coal mining industry from paying potentially billions of dollars in additional benefits to miners with black lung disease.

By a 5-4 vote, the court said that miners with less than 10 years of work in the mines are eligible to claim benefits if there is other evidence they are disabled.

But the court also overturned a lower court ruling that could have opened the way for claims by possibly more than 100,000 miners seeking as much as $13.6 billion in benefits. Miners in that class failed to pursue administrative remedies or to appeal to the courts within the prescribed time, the justices ruled.