Not just another dead beat dad story

Great Debates
1

Ok, I’m on the record pretty substantially as ‘you have a kid, you owe child support’. This link is short on details but provides for an interesting start, I think.
Situation:

Father is incarcerated in prison for 8 and a half years on a rape charge. After that time, DNA testing prove that he was innocent of the charge. He was released. However, since his kids received state aid during his incarceration, he’s now being charged (financially) with repaying the state for those monies spent on his kids while he was wrongfully incarcerated.

Discussion??

2

Bummer.

But this isn’t a “child support” story at all. It’s a wrongful-imprisonment story. I don’t see the child support debt (and it is his child we’re talking about) as being any worse than any of the other financial disasters that must have hit this guy because he spent eight years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. That’s why they’re talking about raising the amount of compensation for prisoners who are later proven to be innocent.

3

How about they forget about charging him, since it was their fault that he was incarcerated and unable to earn money? It doesn’t say anything in the article, but I would be talking to a lawyer to counter-sue if I were him. I would hope that if he took this to the legal system, the least that would happen is the bill for child support would go away.

4

And the father was only separated from his wife & children because of the wrongful conviction? If so then I feel asking him to pay it back is the worst kind of bullshit, to put it mildly. Since it was the state who made the error, it should be the state who deals with the ramifications.

5

I don’t think you will get much debate out of this as stated, wring. So…I agree that the state should definitely increase (substantially) the amount paid to people wrongfully imprisoned. But I think there should be a distinction made between people who are later proved to be innocent (including, apparently, this case) and people whose guilt is merely shown to be doubtful.

As for this case itself, I wonder if it the result of different agencies of government not interacting with each other. IOW there may be no way to the welfare agency to compensate for the activities of the justice dept. More a case of bureaucracy rolling on, rather than deliberate decision.

6

well, Izzy, yea, this seems to be a ‘no brainer’ (except, of course for those who have sent the back child support notice). However, according to the link, there are a number of states that routinely do not compensate some one for being wrongfully incarcerated. Some only pay for those whose convictions were the result of malicious prosecution, deliberate false testimony on the part of the state’s witnesses etc. (IOW, those cases where the prosecution engineered a false conviction, vs. one where the false conviction ‘merely happened’)

In addition, the ‘merely wrongly convicted’ type of stance isn’t quite as clear, either, as you would like to think. In reading the book “Innocence Project” (Scheck,Neuffeld, Dwyer), there was a death penalty case where the guy was convicted of the rape/murder of a young woman, DNA proved he didn’t rape her, the prosecutor shrugged and said ‘well, maybe he didn’t rape her, but he could have killed her anyhow’, tho the entire case brought against him was that it was a murder brought on by the rape and one perpetrator. (and IIRC, the guy who got the d/p conviction on Henry Lee Lucas in the case of “orange socks” wasn’t convinced even when work records proved that Lucas was in Florida at the time ‘he coulda gotten out of work, driven straight through to Texas, murdered the girl, hopped back into the car and driven straight back to Fl in time to be at work again’ )

I do, however, understand your reluctance to ‘pay’ for the incarceration of some one guilty but wrongfully convicted.

7

wring

I basically agree with everything in your last post. Determining guilt or innocence can be difficult enough at the trial, let alone afterwards. Even in the scenario that you describe (the murder/rape case) it is not necessarily as straightforward as you might think. During the last election season, there was a lot of attention paid to whether GWB would reprieve the death sentence of a murderer/rapist for 30 days in order to allow for the DNA testing that might clear his name. The DA who had prosecuted the case pointed out that the DNA testing (on the semen IIRC) was only relevant to the issue of whether the guy was the rapist - the murder charge had independent forensic evidence (the victim’s blood had been found all over the guy’s car etc.) So that if the semen was someone else’s it would only show that someone else was involved as well. (Ultimately the guy was reprived and the DNA confirmed guilt).

In all, there are 3 cases.
[ul]
[li]The accused is discovered to have been innocent (e.g. new DNA or forensic evidence or the like). I think everyone would agree that there should be restitution. (The knowledge that this is not the case comes as a surprise to me).[/li]
[li]The accused’s case is overturned on a technicality that does not affect the evidence itself (prosecutor misconduct, Miranda etc.). I think no one would compensate in this instance.[/li]
[li]The accused’s guilt is cast into doubt (e.g. significant doubt is cast on the reliability of a key piece of evidence & the remaining evidence is not as conclusive). I would not compensate in this instance.[/li][/ul]
I personally would not distinguish between willful framing or accidental false conviction, other than for punitive damages (possibly) and individually suing the actual framers.

For another discussion of somewhat similar issues, see this old thread.

8

So here I am, once again taking on a complicated issue past my bedtime. Let’s hope the results are better than usual, although I must admit that I am not optimistic.

Putting aside (if possible) the obscene fact that in a country where people sue for the most insignificant slights and collect, a person who has been wrongly deprived of his liberty for a significant percentage of his life is often left with no recourse, the State of Kentucky’s (or more likely, the county’s) filing of a petition to recover welfare funds spent for the support of the hapless Mr. Williams’ child during his incarceration is not necessarily as severe a perversion of justice as it may immediately appear.

We do not have enough facts to judge the situation.

I am not a lawyer, but I work in the support part of a Family Court on Long Island, New York. I am basing my reply soley on my limited experience (four years of listening to up to 40 support cases a day, many of which were initiated by the county). Granted that in Kentucky the statutes and procedures may be very different, but in New York, the mere filing of a petition against a parent whose child has been supported by public funds is routine, and is not in any way predictive of the outcome. The person who made the decision to file the petition on behalf of the county welfare department would not have been privy to Mr. Williams’ circumstances before the filing and could make a decision to forego support based upon the wrongful incarceration.

Once the petition is filed and comes to court, the county attorney who prosecutes the case has a great deal of latitude in his/her dealings with the respondent parent. It is not unusual for a county attorney to withdraw the county’s petition for back child support if, after conferencing with the respondent parent, it becomes apparent that it would be inappropriate for the county to seek reimbursement for whatever reason. Mr. Williams’ plight might well be good enough reason in the eyes of a county attorney.

I notice that the article in your link refers to Mr. Williams as living on the street after his release from prison. From that, we may perhaps assume that Mr. Williams’ relationship with his son’s mother is over, since he might otherwise have been able to stay with her at least temporarily after his release. If Mr. Williams and the mother of his child were not living together and supporting the child jointly, and Mr. Williams did not have sole custody of the child himself before his incarcertion, Mr. Williams would STILL have been liable for child support even if the welfare system never became involved. He would have just been paying the mother instead of the county. If it were to be determined in court that the support which Mr. Williams could be held liable for based on his income (or income earning potential) were substantially lower than the monthly welfare grant actually paid out for his child, the county attorney would most likely agree to a retroactive child support order to run at the lower rate.

 If the petition for support for the children were filed * after* Mr. Williams was incarcerated, the Hearing Examiner (who judges support cases in our court) might rule after hearing that the Respondent had no ability to pay during the period of his incarceration, and might waive the back child support for that period.

 I could go on and on, albeit poorly and inexpressively, but suffice it to say that the filing of the petition against Mr. Williams does NOT necessarily mean that he will end up *paying* back child support to the welfare department.