In re Garstka
| Decision Date | 27 January 1969 |
| Docket Number | No. 12455.,12455. |
| Citation | 295 F. Supp. 833 |
| Parties | In re Petition for Naturalization of Konrad GARSTKA. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — Western District of Michigan |
Lowell R. Palmes, Asst. Dist. Director, for Citizenship, Detroit, Mich., for naturalization examiner.
Melvyn E. Stein, Chicago, Ill., for petitioner.
The United States Naturalization Service opposes the petition of Konrad Garstka on the grounds that he fathered an illegitimate child born June 7, 1964, and has therefore not established that he is of the requisite good moral character for citizenship.
Because good moral character requires a case-by-case analysis, the background surrounding the petitioner's alleged illicit behavior should be examined. Petitioner, a widower, was employed from July, 1963, to February, 1965, as a physician in the Memorial Hospital at Elmhurst, Illinois. During that time he became acquainted with a nineteen year old nurse's aid named Linda Altendorf. They dated frequently and on a number of occasions engaged in sexual relations. On June 7, 1964, Linda gave birth to a child. Child support proceedings were subsequently instituted against petitioner. A Paternity Draft Order from the First Municipal District of the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, No. 64 CCMC 279553 entered on December 17, 1964, indicates the petitioner's admitted paternity of the child and that he was ordered to pay $80 per month toward the support of the child. To date, petitioner has complied with the order of the court.
Section 101(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 U.S.C. § 1101(f) describes conduct which precludes a finding of good moral character: adultery, murder, perjury, trafficking in narcotics, and crimes of moral turpitude. There is no claim that petitioner's conduct puts him into any of the above categories. However, the definition goes on to say:
"The fact that any person is not within any of the foregoing classes shall not preclude a finding that for other reasons such person is or is not of good moral character."
No case which holds conduct such as petitioner's to be not of good moral character has been cited to the court. The cases closest to the instant situation involve sexual relations between an unmarried petitioner and an unmarried partner. The great weight of authority has been that such conduct does not preclude a finding of good moral character. Schmidt v. United States, 177 F.2d 450 (2nd Cir. 1949); In re Kielblock's Petition, 163 F.Supp. 687 (S.D.Cal. 1958); Petition of Denessy, 200 F.Supp. 354 (D.Del. 1961); In re Van Dessel, 243 F. Supp. 328 (E.D.Pa.1965).
The problems raised by this type of case were perhaps best analyzed by Learned Hand in Schmidt, supra, 177 F.2d at 451-452:
It must be owned that the law upon the subject is not free from doubt. We do not see how we can get any help from outside. It would not be practicable—even if the parties had asked for it, which they did not—to conduct an inquiry as to what is the common conscience on the point. Even though we could take a poll, it would not be enough merely to count heads, without any appraisal of the voters. A majority of the votes of those in prisons and brothels, for instance, ought scarcely to outweigh the votes of accredited churchgoers. Nor can we see any reason to suppose that the opinion of clergymen would be a more reliable estimate than our own. The situation is one in which to proceed by any available method would not be more likely to satisfy the impalpable standard, deliberately chosen, than that we adopted in the foregoing cases: that is, to resort to our own conjecture, fallible as we recognize it to be. It is true that recent investigations have attempted to throw light upon the actual habits of men in the petitioner's position, and they have disclosed—what few people would have doubted in any event—that his practice is far from uncommon; but it does not follow that on this point common practice may not have diverged as much from precept as it often does. We have answered in the negative the question whether an unmarried man must live completely celibate, or forfeit his claim to a "good moral character"; but, as we have said, those were cases of...
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In re Mortyr, Misc. No. 281.
...the district court held that mere fornication was not grounds for denial of a naturalization petition. And in In re Garstka, 295 F.Supp. 833 (W.D.Mich.1969), the court held that a widowed petitioner's sexual activities with an unmarried woman which resulted in the birth of an illegitimate c......