Bill Would Tie DNA to Child Support

Among the hundreds of bills piled on Gov. Gray Davis’ desk is one that delves into one of the most tangled issues of family law: Should men who have been treated as fathers by the courts but are later proved to have no biological relationship to children still be required to pay child support?

AB 2240 would allow men to extract themselves from some child-support judgments if they can prove they are not the biological father. The bill passed overwhelmingly in the Legislature. It follows a nationwide trend in states rewriting laws to let men escape support obligations if they can prove, using DNA technology, no biological relationship.

“Both houses of the Legislature, in excess of two-thirds, said this is just and fair,” said Assemblyman Roderick Wright (D-Los Angeles), the bill’s author. “Why should a guy who’s not the father of a child be forced to pay for something he’s not responsible for?”

But some advocates for women and children say the bill is poorly written and does not correctly address the knotty problem.

“The bill is not ready for prime time, and we hope the governor will veto it and direct the Department of Child Support Services to come back with a more workable version,” said Lenny Goldberg, a lobbyist for the Assn. of Children for the Enforcement of Support and for the National Youth Law Center.

A spokesman for the governor said Davis has yet to take a position on the bill. He has until Sept. 30 to veto it or sign it into law.

At issue is a tradition in civil litigation holding that a court judgment becomes permanent if it is not swiftly challenged. In child-support cases, that means that when men do not answer summonses to court, they can be ruled the father of the child in question through a default judgment. DNA tests that show they are not related are not admissible after 18 months.

Default judgments represent 80% of all child-support judgments in Los Angeles County, and there have been repeated complaints about shoddy serving of court summonses by child-support agencies. Groups that advocate for fathers’ rights argue that the system is rigged to ensnare men; those organizations have succeeded in persuading eight states to alter their laws on the matter.

But some women’s groups give examples of men who have acted as fathers for years suddenly being freed to abandon the child because of a blood test. That, they say, is too disruptive to children, depriving them of the only father they have known.

Wright’s bill, which went through many revisions, allows default judgments to be challenged up to three years after the man becomes aware of their existence, and requires that all targets of child-support complaints be personally served with their court summons. It also allows judges to maintain the judgment if they decide it is in the child’s best interests that the man keep paying--regardless of what the DNA test establishes about paternity.

Those provisions worry some critics of the legislation, who say the standards allowing judges latitude are ill-defined.

“It’s probably going to be open to a tremendous amount of interpretation from the judges,” said Geraldine Jensen, head of the Assn. of Children for the Enforcement of Support , which backed a bill in Ohio to allow some men wrongfully identified as fathers to escape support orders. “Certainly, something needs to be done about this issue, because technology has sort of caught up with society.”

Carson resident Bert Riddick, who has been dunned for tens of thousands of dollars in child support for a girl he is not related to and has never seen, said that despite the amendments, the bill would still remedy injustices.

“It’s still a good bill,” he said.