THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, August 5, 1995 TAG: 9508040005
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 42 lines
Never mind the fancy Latin terms for the legalisms that stick Federico Ampey with a $158 biweekly bill for a child who is not his. There's plain English for the Norfolk judge's ruling this week that Mr. Ampey must continue to pay child support for a teenager who DNA analysis proves is not his. To-wit: It's a crock.
As if the O. J. trial weren't enough, it's the kind of mumbus jumbus that makes Earl Pittses of us all: Condemn these officials to a lifetime of clasping, unclasping and reclasping shower curtains on those pesky plastic rings.
It's also the kind of ruling that leaves ordinary people with ordinary common sense shaking their heads at the extraordinary slyness of The Law. Here's a man who tried to do right, protested all the while that officialdom was wrong, had minimal help through the legal maze that landed him here and gets no help finding his way out: He remains in a trap of legal parenthood that officialdom, not Mr. Ampey, created.
Irresponsible fathers are the bane of society's present existence, and fatherless children are its major sadness. But two wrongs never made a right. Yet a judicial system that for 80 years counted unfree Americans as three-fifths a person, that for 120 years considered women too hormonal to vote - that still considers new evidence of innocence no bar to execution - remains loath to admit its wrongs and right them. The child-support-enforcement system also sees no problem with what Mr. Ampey's volunteer attorney, Everett C. Meixel, correctly zaps as an ``Any dad'll do ya'' philosophy.
``Two hundred years of jurisprudence,'' the judge says, take precedence. There's plenty of ``juris'' - ``law'' - in his ruling, but not a whit of prudence.
KEYWORDS: CHILD SUPPORT PATERNITY by CNB