A court had ordered Sherman Gordon to support his daughter, but Illinois gave his only asset, a $2,500 car, to his parents and siblings

Sherman Gordon lived in Chicago with Jessie Trimble and their daughter, Deta Mona, from 1970. On 2 January 1973 an Illinois circuit court found him to be Deta Mona's father and ordered him to pay $15 a week in support. He paid and openly acknowledged her. In 1974 he was killed, aged 28. He left no will. His estate was a 1974 Plymouth worth about $2,500. Section 12 of the Illinois Probate Act let a child born outside marriage inherit by intestacy only from the mother. The probate court named his heirs as his father, his mother, his brother, two sisters and a half brother, and excluded his daughter. Had she been born in marriage she would have taken everything. Jessie Trimble appealed for her daughter. On 26 April 1977 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Section 12 by 5 votes to 4 in Trimble v. Gordon. Justice Powell wrote that "the Equal Protection Clause requires more than the mere incantation of a proper state purpose." Chief Justice Burger and Justices Stewart, Blackmun and Rehnquist dissented. Rehnquist called the Illinois rule "not mindless and patently irrational." The case was sent back to the Illinois courts. The ruling bars a state from excluding a child from a father's intestate estate only because the parents were not married.