Court Opinion

ID: 9649627
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 15:04:03.944698+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:13.227222
License: Public Domain

DISSENTING OPINION BY
CAVANAUGH, J.
¶ 1 I respectfully dissent from the majority’s disposition on the basis of judicial estoppel applied against the appehee. Rather, since both appellant-mother and appehee have made conflicting claims regarding appehee’s paternity in prior judicial proceedings, I beheve it is inequitable to apply the doctrine of judicial estoppel solely against appehee.
¶ 2 The majority holds that since appel-lee denied paternity in a prior support proceeding, he is judicially estopped from claiming paternity in the instant matter. However, appehant-mother in the prior proceedings made the claim that appehee was the father. In both prior custody and support proceedings, mother maintained that appehee was the father of S.A.J. Mother now holds the position that appel-lee is not S.A.J.’s father.
¶ 3 A basic tenet of equity is that the party who seeks to invoke it, must have clean hands. “The doctrine of unclean hands requires that one seeking equity act fairly and without fraud or deceit as to the controversy at issue.” Terraciano v. Commonwealth, 562 Pa. 60, 753 A.2d 233, 237-238 (2000). A court may deprive a party of equitable relief where, to the detriment of the other party, the party applying for such relief is guilty of bad conduct relating to the matter at issue. Id. at 237.
¶ 4 Since mother herself has made inconsistent statements in prior judicial proceedings, involving both custody and support, concerning appellee’s parental status, she does not have the requisite clean hands to invoke the doctrine of judicial estoppel against appellee. Either both are estopped, or neither is estopped from taking a position during the instant proceeding which is inconsistent from one taken during prior proceedings.
¶ 5 Judicial estoppel is an equitable, judicially-created doctrine designed to protect the integrity of the courts by preventing litigants from “playing fast and loose” with the judicial system by adopting whatever position suits the moment. Sunbeam Corp. v. Liberty Mut. Ins. Co., 566 Pa. 494, 781 A.2d 1189, 1192 (2001). However, the integrity of the court is not served by the selective application of the doctrine of judicial estoppel when each party to a proceeding has maintained a previous contrary position.
¶ 6 Regarding the prohibition against “playing fast and loose,” the lower court’s comments regarding mother’s actions bear consideration:
Mother and Mother’s Husband could not have been unaware of the solid grounds for S.S.’s claim to paternity and of his intentions to seek a relationship with his biological child; and yet, instead of properly noticing the most likely biological father of the child, Mother and/or Mother’s Husband sought out a plausible putative father of the child who would be agreeable to giving up all rights with which Mother might or might not have endowed him. Mother did not notify in this adoption proceeding the man who she had previously claimed to be the father of the child. Indeed, if Mother’s testimony can be believed, this adoption was open to challenge on yet another ground; that ‘there could have been’ yet another man who had sexual relations with her during the relevant period, and yet no notice was given to that man personally, or even, in *303the event Mother did not know his name, by publication to an unknown John Doe.
Mother appears to have planned well to preclude S.S. from even having the opportunity for a say in these proceedings and that, likely, in the form of an involuntary termination proceeding. Instead she simply removed him from the process by conveniently finding someone to act as the putative father and consent to the termination of any rights he might have had in the child, if indeed he had fathered same — see, please, the very carefully worded consent executed by B.W. indicating he had been named as the father, and not that he was or claimed to be the father.
If blame be laid to anyone’s door, it is to Mother and her husband in not disclosing the full history of the prior and extensive litigation to their hand-picked adoption attorney. In the past this Court has asked searching questions of biological mothers, even in cases of rape or statutory rape, so that when an adoption decree is signed by this Court it can be defended against the world. In the instant case, the biological mother and adoptive father took pains to conceal such information from this Court, and from the man who it appears is the biological father of this child.
Lower court opinion, 6/25/01, at 11-13.
¶ 7 Mother should not be the beneficiary of the application of the equitable doctrine of judicial estoppel given her lack of candor to the court below and her own conflicting statements made in prior proceedings concerning the paternity status of appellee.
¶8 My review of the record convinces me that the lower court was without error in vacating the adoption decree. It did so reluctantly, but in recognition that the belated attempts of S.S. to establish paternity were improperly thwarted by the legal machinations, if not outright fraud and deceit, of the mother and her husband. The order should be affirmed, and, therefore, I dissent.