Dennis Caron, 43, was recently sent to jail for refusing to pay child support (Child support activist jailed in Ohio for failing to pay alimony). Caron, in fact, has been withholding his child support since 1997 for what he thinks are pretty good reasons — not only has the mother cut off his scheduled visitations with the his son, but Caron says the child in question is not even his. Caron doesn’t just base that on his own subjective opinion, but says that DNA evidence proves that he couldn’t be the father of the boy.
There’s only one problem — he can’t get a judge in Ohio to even consider his claim. Caron and his wife divorced in 1992 at which time a child support order was entered. Under Ohio law, Caron had only a year after his divorce was finalized to challenge the paternity of the child. Since he didn’t learn that he wasn’t the father until after this year time limit had expired, he can’t legally challenge the child support order.
Along with filing hundreds of motion to try to get a paternity hearing, Caron has been campaigning for a bill that would bring Ohio’s law into the 21st century by allowing men to stop making child support payments and sue to recover past child support payments if a DNA test shows they are not the father of the child. The Ohio state House already passed the measure and it currently is in committee in the state Senate.
As Bonnie Erbe commented on the case in a recent op-ed piece,
Talk about lose-lose situations, the Caron/Manfresca situation is clearly one such. The little boy has already lost. He has been given over to a parent who persuaded someone to marry her by telling him his sperm caused her
pregnancy, when there was at least the strong possibility that someone
else was the more likely progenitor. She also had no right to accept his
payments of child support under such fraudulent circumstances.
Reforming Ohio’s law to take into account DNA tests after the 1 year deadline would allow Caron and others to get out from under egregious abuses of the child support system while at the same time discouraging the sort of frivolous paternity challenges that the one year deadline was meant to prevent.