52 N.C. 100 | N.C. | 1859
The action was commenced in the county court upon notice to the defendants, who are the administrators of the putative father, to show cause why they should not be charged with the maintenance of a bastard child. It was proved that at the time of the examination of the mother, defendants' intestate, the person charged with being the father was dead. This cause being shown, the court ordered the defendants, as administrators of B.L. Durham, deceased, to be charged with the maintenance of the child. From this order the defendants appealed.
The proceedings against the putative father of a bastard child, for the purpose of compelling him to maintain such a child, are founded altogether upon our statute law, and must in every respect be regulated by it. This law is now contained in the first seven sections of chapter 12, Revised Code. The proceedings which it authorizes are not in the nature of a criminal prosecution, but are police regulations, having for their object indemnity for the county against the burden of maintaining the bastard child. They do not lose their character of being civil proceedings, even when an issue is made up, under section 4 of the act to try the question of the paternity of the child. See Wardv. Bell, ante, 79, where all the prior cases on the subject are referred to. Being, then, civil, in contradistinction to criminal proceedings, it is contended that they may be commenced and prosecuted (101) against the personal representative of the reputed father after *79
his death; and it is said that the first chapter of the Revised Code authorizes it in the following words of the first section: "No action, suit, bill in equity, or information in the nature of a bill in equity, or other proceedings of whatever nature, brought to recover or obtain money, property or damages, or to have relief of any kind whatever, whether the same be at law or in equity, except suits for penalties and for damages merely vindictive, shall abate by reason of the death of either party," etc. It is manifest that proceedings in bastardy cannot properly be called an action, suit, or other proceeding to recover or obtain money, property, or damages, but are, as we have said before, only police regulations, adopted for the purpose of relieving the public from the support of bastard children, by imposing it upon the putative fathers of such children. Viewed in that light, they cannot come within the rule laid down in Butner v. Keehln,
The order made in the Superior Court must, therefore, be reversed and the proceedings dismissed.
PER CURIAM. Reversed. *80