Solomonic Ruling Splits Sperm of Dead Man : Courts: Three of 15 vials go to the late lawyer’s girlfriend, who wants to conceive a baby. The man’s grown children battled her claim for 2 1/2 years.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled Monday that a woman whose longtime boyfriend willed her vials of his sperm is entitled to 20% of the fluid, now stored in a Westside sperm bank.

“My job is not to legislate good taste but uphold and interpret the law,” Judge Arnold Gold told the assembled parties in what has become a bitter as well as precedent-setting 2 1/2-year struggle between the girlfriend and the grown children of the late William E. Kane, a Malibu attorney.

Deborah Hecht, 39, will get three of the 15 vials in accordance with the judge’s interpretation of an estate settlement agreement reached a couple of months after Kane’s suicide in October, 1991.

That agreement did not specifically mention the sperm, so it was put aside as the parties battled over whether frozen sperm could be considered part of a man’s estate. Last June, a state Court of Appeal ruled that it could. In September, the California Supreme Court let that decision stand.

To remove any possibility that the distribution of the vials could be seen as an infringement upon the children’s right to an allowance from the estate before it is finally settled, the judge ordered Hecht to pay into the estate the monetary value of the sperm: $60.

“All I want is one baby,” Hecht said tearfully after the judge’s decision. “One vial might do it.”

Each side has lashed out at the other in the case. Hecht and her attorneys contend that Kane’s children did not want to share their portion of the estate with any future half-siblings--although she has said she would not make any claims on behalf of a child. Kane’s children say that they oppose the award of the sperm to Hecht only because, they allege, she was aware for several weeks of their father’s desire to kill himself and did nothing to stop him from carrying out his intentions in a Las Vegas hotel room.

“It’s not a money issue,” said Sandra Irwin, the Kane children’s attorney, after the judge’s decision. Irwin, who is also their mother, was divorced from Kane 19 years ago. “It’s a moral issue.”

Hecht--who was not in Las Vegas at the time of Kane’s death--has steadfastly maintained that she did all she could to prevent him from killing himself, and police have cleared her of any criminal wrongdoing in the death.