High court backs women in pursuit of child support

Wednesday, Sept. 2, 1998 | 11:01 a.m.

CARSON CITY -- Women trying to collect child support from as far back as July 1981 have won a victory in the Nevada Supreme Court.

The court, in a multi-faceted decision Tuesday, ruled there is no statute of limitation to prevent mothers from filing lawsuits to recover money that was owed up to 17 years ago.

Justice Cliff Young, who wrote the majority opinion, said the intent of a new law in 1987 was to "remove obstacles to collecting unpaid child support."

Young said there was testimony before the 1987 Legislature that non-custodial parents sometimes went into hiding to avoid paying child support because of a 1981 law in which there was a six-year statute of limitation.

The decision overturned rulings involving nine men who were ordered prior to July 1987 to pay child support in cases in Nevada, California, North Dakota and Washington. Washoe District Judges James Stone and Scott Jordan held the women were barred from recovering child support payments if they had waited more than six years from the last payment to sue.

Stone and Jordan relied on a prior Supreme Court decision in imposing the limitation but the high court said Tuesday it is clarifying its prior ruling.

In some of the cases, the state was involved in seeking the recovery of welfare payments made to these mothers who were not getting their child support.

The court refused to rule that this state must allow women to go back further than 1981 if another state had a longer statute of limitation. Young said the women were precluded from pursuing that issue because they had not raised it in the district court.