The Sun Journal deserves praise for bypassing “gossip-page value” in its July 12 editorial, “A chance to review residency,” and for its attempt to focus on the legal issues in the adoption case involving Olive Watson and our client, Patricia Spado. The editorial, however, focused on a secondary issue, rather than the primary one.

This case does not primarily concern residency requirements. Rather, the central question is whether an adoption, undertaken without fraud, on the advice of lawyers, can be overturned 17 years after it was granted.

The law always has required that someone seeking to overturn an adoption to prove it was obtained by fraud – for good reason. Children, for example, deserve stability on such a basic issue as who their parents are. Imagine the nightmare of re-trying a case decades after your adoption, searching for stale or lost information about events that happened when you were a baby.

So the Legislature wisely requires that, to annul an adoption (of a child or adult), plaintiffs must show more than a past legal mistake: They must plead and prove fraud.

In this case, there was no fraud. Indeed, no one even pleaded Ms. Watson or Ms. Spado intended to deceive the adoption court in 1991; in fact, the opposite can be proven.

Everyone agrees Ms. Watson and Ms. Spado sought advice from attorneys in New York and Maine about where they could obtain a legal adoption. They were advised New York would not allow it, and, therefore, they did not seek one there. Maine was different. In 1991, anyone who lived here could be adopted here; otherwise, one could be adopted in Maine only by someone residing here. As the Sun Journal rightly noted, there are many situations where people who are not full-blown “residents” of Maine can “live” here. This was one. So the lawyers advised the couple a Maine adoption would be lawful, as long as Ms. Spado was living at their summer home in North Haven (something the two did every year) at the time of the adoption.

These facts disprove fraud in two ways. First, pursuing a lawful adoption is not fraud, and we believe the lawyers were right that the adoption was lawful. But more important, even if the lawyers were wrong, seeking, trusting and following legal advice is the opposite of fraud.

The probate court’s annulment of the adoption, which we’ve appealed to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, potentially places hundreds of adoptions – executed by parties who acted in good faith, and who believed they were obeying the law – at risk. The implications for families with adopted members are awful.

This is the problem now before the Maine Supreme Judicial Court.

Attorneys Clifford Ruprecht and Cathy Connors, of the Portland firm Pierce Atwood, represent Patricia Spado.