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Monday, February 06, 2012
Courts - "Kentucky rulings can affect some fairly unusual events"
Andrew Wolfson of the Louisville Courier Journal has a lengthy story today - here he sets up the premise:
Do you have the right to swear at a police officer who stops you for speeding?Here are two samples:Are you liable if you wave another driver into a road and he or she gets hit?
Can you sue a person who steals away your spouse?
The Kentucky Supreme Court and Court of Appeals in Frankfort may seem far removed from our lives. But it has addressed those and other issues that affect us every day — on the highway, in the bedroom and in our most intimate relationships.
Do you have the right to visit your grandchild, even over the objections of your adult child and his or her spouse?
If you father a child during an affair with a married woman, do you have a right to visit the child?
If you give a confession when drunk, can it be used against you?
With help from attorneys, judges and law professors, The Courier-Journal collected 10 decisions that the high courts have rendered in the past four decades to address those and other questions.
If I father a child during an affair with a married woman, do I have any right to visit my child?ILB: The answers would not necessarily be the same if we were looking at Indiana law.For 2,000 years the law presumed that a child born during a marriage was fathered by the husband because it was impossible to prove otherwise — unless the husband was on the high seas for the nine months before the child was born.
But the advent of DNA testing made proving paternity a virtual certainty.
Bowing to that reality, the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled in May that men who father a child during an affair with a married woman have the right to seek a role in the child’s life. Kentucky joined 32 other states that allow a man to challenge the presumption that a baby born to a married couple is the husband’s.
The ruling came over the objection of the girl’s mother and conservatives who said it would tear apart marriages. One justice said in dissent that it consigned the institution of marriage “to the funeral pyre of modern convenience and unanchored values.”
But others cheered it, saying it would allow men, such as Christopher H. Egan of Northern Kentucky, who fathered the the baby girl during an extramarital affair, to step up and accept responsibility.
Egan’s lawyer, Erin Wilkins, said he is now seeing his daughter.
“He could have walked away, but he wanted to know her,” Wilkins said. “He wanted to do the right thing, and I think he should be applauded.”
May I visit my grandchild, over the objections of my own adult child and his spouse?
Boyle County farmer W.R. King saw his baby granddaughter, Jessica, nearly every day for her first 16 months. But after he kicked son Stewart off the farm in 1988, Stewart and his wife wouldn’t let King see his granddaughter.
Four years earlier, the Kentucky General Assembly had enacted a law allowing judges the power to award grandparents visitation rights, if it is in the child’s best interest.
But her parents said the law was unconstitutional — that the government has no right to tell parents how to raise their children, as long as they are not being neglected or abused.
The Supreme Court upheld the law — and King’s right to see his grandchild. Lamenting the disintegration of the American family, it said that if a grandparent is physically, mentally and morally fit, then a grandchild will ordinarily benefit from contact with the grandparent.
There is no reason a “petty dispute between a parent and child” should deprive a grandparent and grandchild of the unique relationship that ordinarily exists between them, the court said.
And one thing I'd like to have seen is references to the decisions relied upon.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on February 6, 2012 01:20 PM
Posted to Courts in general