This is actually a legitimately brilliant idea that has never occurred to me before.
The Tennessee House and Senate have unanimously passed a bill requiring drunk drivers who kill the parents of a minor child to pay child support to the orphaned son or daughter until they turn 18.
Well, normal civil liability should take into account the child who is orphaned. But that can sometimes be written off with bankruptcy. Child support does not go away so easily. I think you can garnish a higher percent of wages, too.
On the other hand if you’re in jail you aren’t making money. The driver in the case that spawned this law was apparently sentenced for 11 years, so if the kids were at least 7 years old they wouldn’t necessarily see a dime from the new law, if it had been in place at the time.
~Max
I suspect fairly little money will actually make it to the kids’ families when it’s most needed. Vehicular homicide carries lengthy sentences, and someone locked up for 15 years with no income won’t be paying monthly child support unless they have extensive savings.
They’ll still owe the full amount when they get out, but the kid will be grown at that point.
Here is a summary of the bill to clear up a couple misconceptions @Max_S has.
Thanks.
~Max
Further thoughts. This is not a good law. This is a law about performative vengeance rather than helping orphaned children.
A good law would have the state making child support payments from day 1, and requiring the convicted individual to make restitution to the state in the same amount. Exact same burden on the murderer, a much better outcome for the child.
Hm, you might be right about that. How are they going to pay child support when they’re in prison?
Right. But it’s bipartisan, has fabulous optics, and will cost the state almost nothing. Solemn, congratulatory handshakes all around.
This.
The only way I could see this law working would be if the drunk driver were wealthy and had sufficient assets that, even while he was sitting in prison, those assets could be liquidated and then used to pay child support to the kids, or, if already liquid, then paid to them. So John Doe the millionaire DUI-er is supporting the kids even while incarcerated.
If it were some impoverished drunk driver, then, yeah, it’s not going to work. Can’t squeeze blood out of a rock.
I don’t disagree with this. I have argued in the past that all child support should work this way. However, I’m 38 and most of my same-age friends are still paying off their student loans, while worrying about the insane cost of buying a house and starting their own families. I know at least one person who had an adequate college fund until her parents divorced, and the money went to endless court battles. So I think even belated child support could help the adult orphan with costs incurred during childhood.
Rather like ‘The War on Drugs’ … now how did that turn out?!
The drugs won.
A good law would have the state pay the child support if the drunk driver cannot. And why does this apply only to drunk drivers? Shouldn’t this happen as the result of any homicide where the victim has minor children without having to sue?
Fully agree. If someone is texting and driving or cleaning a gun and it goes off or knocks someone off of a ladder, then why is that treated differently? Because of the handshakes and the easy votes from the MADD crowd.
Who supports an orphaned child now (whether in Tennessee or elsewhere)? Do orphaned children beg in the streets or get the Oliver Twist treatment now?
Currently, orphaned children are either placed with a relative or, alternatively, put into the foster care system where they are shuffled from place to place, possibly abused or neglected, in some cases die or are entirely lost, and even best case on their 18th birthday they’re booted out with a hearty AMF YOYO because they’re supposed to be adults now and able to fend for themselves, right?
(In a lot of places an 18 year old, even with a job, can’t legally sign the lease to a rental property on their own, I shudder to think where that leaves these young adults with no support system)
That’s a horrible assessment of most foster parents. In my experience, foster parents are generally wonderful people. Like any human activity, there are some assholes involved, but I think your statements are over the top.
Maybe in West Virginia it’s a paradise for orphans but from what I’ve seen in the Chicago area it’s pretty bleak.
In the 1990’s I worked with a clinic involved in social services and saw some pretty horrible stuff.
Yes, sometimes it all works out. Sometimes the kids wind up dead or abused or Og knows what. And foster care ends at 18 - unless said foster parents are willing to continue to help such kids they really are out on their own at 18. And I know from experience that you can not rent an apartment on your own at 18 in Chicago, which is how some of those people wind up homeless or living in shelters or getting involved in some very shady shit just to have a roof over their heads.
“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” -John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under Nixon
This feels performative and a tad illogical. If we start with the premise that causing the death of a parent through negligence or malice should put you on the hook for that child’s upkeep–and I don’t find that premise particularly objectionable, a big question is raised “why only for children whose parents were killed by drunk drivers?” Drunk drivers who kill people are scumbags, but I don’t think they exist in a class of killer altogether worse than other classes of killer. In fact I think a deliberate / pre-meditated murderer, even one who doesn’t have pre-meditation but commits a murder to say, advance an robbery etc–is a worse moral offense than drunk driving causing death. The drunk driver is ostensibly just recklessly indifferent to human life, a murderer has chosen to deliberately kill someone.
The fact that as @UltraVires says this only targets people that MADD lobby about, suggests a degree of political grandstanding.
The law may also be fairly redundant. The reality is anyone who kills another person through a criminal act, and has meaningful assets, is very likely to lose those assets in civil litigation once the criminal trial has concluded. Wrongful death particularly when the person causing the death was acting criminally, is a pretty easy civil case and going to net millions of dollars for the survivors, so most assets these people have will already be transferred to the family via this process in any case.
Indigent killers well, you’re never going to get much out of them regardless of the law.