Court Opinion

ID: 9729005
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 14:23:32.06223+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:25:54.670596
License: Public Domain

Concurring Opinion by
Mr. Justice Roberts:
It is my view that the rule proscribing husband and wife from testifying to nonaccess is an anachronism and that the time for completely abandoning this rule has arrived. For the law to exclude the very evidence which may go to the heart of the issue in controversy on the basis of a public policy which has ceased to exist is to blind ourselves to the realities of today. In the early 18th century the presumption of legitimacy was conclusive and no evidence which would tend to bastardize the child born to a married couple was permitted to refute this conclusive presumption. Bew v. Luffe, 8 East 193, 208. But that was a rule for an era in which a child once considered illegitimate had no capacity to become legitimatized; the harshness of illegitimacy at common law required a rule which would protect a child born to a married mother, regardless of who the father was.
Today our laws are much more considerate of the status of illegitimacy; some states have abolished the status entirely; in all states a child may be subsequently legitimated; in most states illegitimate children have the same legal rights as legitimate offspring, see Levy v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 68 (1968); even the social stigma attaching to the illegitimate status is less than in an earlier day. To reflect this change in attitude a rule other than one which would exclude the most relevant and compelling evidence is needed. And we need not search far for such a rule which will still reflect a desire to uphold the legitimacy of all children born to married women but at the same time recognize actual parenthood when the contrary holding would offend our sense of justice.
*300Chief Judge Cardozo for the Court of Appeals of New York, in 1930, announced a rule which while permitting the admission of all relevant testimony also made clear that a mere preponderance of the evidence would not be enough to establish illegitimacy. “Issue will not be bastardized as the outcome of a choice between nicely balanced probabilities .... They will not be held legitimate by a sacrifice of probabilities in a futile quest for certainty. Some of the books tell us that, to overcome the presumption [of legitimacy], the evidence of nonaccess must be ‘clear and convincing’ . . . others that it must lead to a conclusion that is ‘strong and irresistible’ . . . others that it must be proof ‘beyond all reasonable doubt’ .... What is meant by these pronouncements, however differently phrased, is this, and nothing more, that the presumption will not fall unless common sense and reason are outraged by a holding that it abides.” In Re Findlay, 253 N.Y. 1, 8, 170 N.E. 471, 473 (1930).
This should be the rule in this Commonwealth as well. We should not blind ourselves to germane evidence as to nonaccess when it is available; in our quest to maintain legitimacy we should not set up artificial rules of evidence which would “consecrate as truth the extravagantly improbable, which may be one, for ends juridical, with the indubitably false.” Id. But by the same token we should require those who would establish illegitimacy through such testimony to carry a heavy burden, one which is in accordance with our public policy in favor of legitimate status.
As for the instant case, I would have permitted the evidence to be admitted as to nonaccess. But I would have placed the burden outlined by Chief Judge Cardozo in In Re Findlay, supra, on appellant to establish that David Leider, and not Paul MacFarland, was the father. And if appellant had carried her burden, *301I would have had David Leider declared the father of the child regardless of whether David Leider had subsequently married the child’s mother.
I concur.