Supreme Court Weighs Rights Of 'Deadbeat' Parents
Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - Go to any shelter for homeless families, and you likely will find children who would not be there but for their fathers' failure to pay child support. Spend a day in family court, and you likely will see indigent fathers, with no lawyer, being taken away in handcuffs because they could not pay the child support they owed. So-called deadbeat parents, usually dads, have long been a conundrum for the law. On Wednesday, they are the U.S. Supreme Court's legal problem. Jailed For Being Too Poor? The justices are hearing a case testing whether indigent parents who fail to make child support payments may be jailed for as much as a year at a time, without the state providing a lawyer. Though most states provide counsel for those too poor to afford legal help, a minority of states do not, including Florida, Georgia, Maine, Ohio and South Carolina. [more]
