THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, August 4, 1995 TAG: 9508040451
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MATTHEW BOWERS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Medium: 59 lines
The fight isn't over for a man who's been ordered to pay support for a girl he's proven he did not father.
Federico L. Ampey, a city sheriff's deputy, will appeal a judge's decision to uphold a child-support order, his lawyer said Thursday. The judge ruled against Ampey on Tuesday, even though he acknowledged that a genetics test proved that Ampey was not her father.
``We're going to take it all the way to the Virginia Supreme Court, if we need to,'' said Everett C. Meixel, a Virginia Beach lawyer who donated his services to Ampey after reading about his plight in the newspaper.
The appeal will start with a hearing in Circuit Court.
This week a second lawyer, whom Meixel declined to name, offered his services to Ampey. Meixel said they hoped to start a fund for Ampey's court and research expenses.
Ampey, 37, blamed his troubles on ignorance of the legal system and not being able to afford a lawyer, troubles he admittedly worsened by signing documents indicating he was the father.
In ruling Tuesday in Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court, Judge William P. Williams relied on centuries-old legal doctrines of ``res judicata'' and ``collateral estoppel,'' which say you can not retry issues or facts that already have been decided in court. Ampey had been ordered to pay support in 1992.
``It's a stupid principle,'' Meixel said. ``I understand that the judge's decision was probably technically correct . . . but that doesn't make it right or make it just.
``I just think that 200 years of doing it wrong are enough.''
The doctrines are intended to ensure that court decisions have finality and can be relied on, but Meixel said their use in cases where there is clear evidence of error - such as an irrefutable DNA test - only undermines the legal system's credibility.
The girl, now 16, lives in a Norfolk girls' home after spending several troubled years of being shuttled among relatives. Her mother has been in a comalike state for about six years since suffering complications during a subsequent childbirth. Ampey had a brief, intimate relationship with the mother that he says ended a year before the girl's birth.
Whatever the courts say, Ampey's legal responsibility toward the girl would end in two or three years, depending on whether she is still in school. For now, Virginia's Division of Child Support Enforcement takes $153 out of his paycheck every two weeks.
``He may wind up paying child support for the next two years, three years, but our goal is to have the 1992 order completely vacated,'' Meixel said. ``If the order never existed, from that point all his money should come back to him.''
KEYWORDS: APPEAL CHILD SUPPORT by CNB