Comment by incahoots | Hacker News Reader

Comment by incahoots | Hacker News Reader

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I've gone through the system in a similar fashion, but with no where near the same outcome as you did. If I hadn't gone through a similar situation I would almost believe that you were making it up, that's how ridiculous this is.

For context I got stopped in a car with a friend who had weed (unknown to me at the time), had a really old warrant for something like a missed child support payment (also didn't know), and we were both removed from the car. Mind you, I was not driving, and the car did not belong to me, I was simply a passenger. Cops claim they have cause to search the car, I can't argue otherwise, car gets searched, weed was found, we both get hit with the charge.

I was expected to pay $6000 for possession, spent a week in jail, lost my job, and had to travel 3 hours to the court house to "appear" in front of a judge with no means of getting there because every waking moment needed me to find a job and save any money I had to pay upcoming rent and needs, in addition to paying child support and not missing a payment otherwise I would end up in jail.

That's how quickly this shit escalates, had I not found a ride to get to the court house at least twice, I would've been arrested for bail jumping, and lost my new job, and my apartment.

Apologizes if I'm taking away from your experience, not my intention. I feel like that if others don't come to share similar stories, people are quick to dispel your situation as a one off, and accuse of not being responsible.

No, you're not taking anything away. Your situation is (sadly) very common indeed.

And as you say, if you start missing child support payments the judge will hit you with contempt charges and put you straight back in jail for several months to teach you a lesson.

If you had ended up in jail the case might have run on for months or years. Once you are inside a jail you lose most contact with your attorney and your support system and you have the lowest priority in the system, so your case is usually just continued each month until the end of time.

Find the wrong cops and you'll end up in jail for months for having some vitamins on you:

https://archive.is/Blzbm

>And as you say, if you start missing child support payments the judge will hit you with contempt charges and put you straight back in jail for several months to teach you a lesson.

All of this should be illegal, debtors prisons by another name is all this is.

It's particularly irrational because they're the ones that put you in the situation of missing child support in the first place. Seems more like extortion and racketeering to me.

When it comes to enforcing custody orders, however, the courts are suddenly as impotent as their 90-year old judges.

"That's a criminal matter - go to the police", say the courts.

"That's a civil matter - go to the courts", say the police.

Morons and Political Hacks[1], the lot of 'em.

  [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ09bnZ747w

Unfortunately, the common refrain in scenarios like this is that it's your fault. Even ignoring the weed, which I think a lot of people would have sympathy for, you owed child support that wasn't paid and had a [bench, presumably] warrant out for your arrest. The simple fact of the matter is that most people don't owe court-mandated child support at any point in their lives, most people that do owe it pay it, and most people don't ever have warrants out for their arrest.

I don't say this as any sort of moral or character judgment, but simply to point out that part of the reason this thing is allowed to happen is because the people it's happening to are very rarely sympathetic individuals. They're viewed as bad people and "others" by the majority of the population.

So what's the fix for this? I wish I had an answer, but I don't. Maybe teaching empathy so that the court system starts feeling pressure from the citizens that this isn't ok. Maybe legislation against charge stacking just to elicit plea deals. There's also the very real possibility of the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction where DAs don't charge petty crime and people charged with violent crimes are released on signature bonds.

"Teaching empathy" won't do a thing and'll just be mocked and memed. We need to start at a lower fundamental.

An easy first step would be to increase accessibility to court documents so that journalists and researchers have better means of researching these complex problems. In Illinois for example, the judicial branch is exempt from FOIA. This effectively manifests itself as an informal allowance of judges/prosecutors to get away with a lot of systemic injustices. They get away with it because the means of identifying these systemic problems is through data and records that exist beyond a moat. One existing alternative to FOIA here is the county clerk's in-person system.. but the system times out on half of its searches, is missing tons of docs, painfully slow, etc. Another existing path is through a FOIA to the State's Attorney's office, but they're notoriously slow and I'm amongst the handful of others who are suing for non-responsiveness. A lot of this is made worse by the State's Attorney hashing person and case identifiers to make it effectively impossible to understand how someone's case progressed through the courts, starting from the arrest.

I think you misread the parent. They didn't have an outstanding warrant, the driver did.

You're right! I'm sure many would still view this as an "oh well, your own fault" type of thing though.

Do you?

You're correct, the friend had the warranty out for child support, I was in good standing paid up.

The fear was being jailed too long to respond to potential employers so that I could continue to work. Child support agencies are immediately notified if you've been let go and will hound you on a daily basis to find employment, there are no breaks.

Thankfully I'm in a much better position in life, but I know what it's like if you don't have access to capital to hire a good defense attorney who isn't behind the 8-ball like public defenders always find themselves.

Just for clarification I wasn't the one with the warrant, nor behind in child support. Entirely my friend's position, not mine.

I think it's important to point out that our justice system is so overburdened with cases they have to take deals, and that's just for the side of the system where folks don't have access to capital to hire good attorneys, they get stuck with the even more overburdened public defenders, who don't eve have time to review any of the details of the charge.

Then there's the other side that is well off and can fight their charge with a great attorney, or a team of lawyers, at which point the county/state decides it's not worth the hassle to tie up their DA on this particular case and they provide the defense with an agreeable plea (usually a slap on the wrist to get it wrapped up quick), then proceed with the next one.

As as most faculties in our society, the issue is and always has been an issue of resources. The problem is everything is paywalled to near obscurity, and we kick the can further down the road.

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