Minnesota recently received some national attention when the state Supreme Court issued a surprising opinion regarding criminal charges filed against a deadbeat father.
Unpaid Child Support in Minnesota
The Court took an unexpected and, in some quarters, unpopular position when it said that the man could not be convicted of failing to “care and support” his children.
The case began when Larry Nelson stopped paying child support for his children 11 years ago. Eleven years is undoubtedly a long time to be in arrears, and it took prosecutors some time to build and then prosecute the delinquent father. When they did, Nelson found himself charged with failing to “care and support” his kids, a phrase his attorney took issue with.
Is not paying child support a criminal violation in Minnesota?
Though Nelson freely admits to not paying to financially support his children, he says he was always around to provide care for them, emotionally and otherwise. He says he participated in their lives and was never an absentee father.
Given the way the law is written, Nelson argued that “caring” and “supporting” were too different legal issues and that a parent would need to be found guilty of failing to both “care” and financially support his or her kids to be convicted.In this case, Nelson says that while he did not support his children, he did care for them, meaning his conviction should be overturned.
Prosecutors took issue with the technical parsing of the state’s statute and said that while support refers to financial issues, such as paying child support, “care and support” also collectively refers to financial matters. The Supreme Court disagreed, and in a 4-3 decision, voted to throw out his conviction.
The majority on the Court wrote that prosecutors could not reasonably claim that both “support” on its own and “care and support” as a phrase referred to the same thing. Even if that was what legislators intended, there was no proof of this and the law as currently interpreted could not support Nelson’s conviction.
Dissenting justices were vocal in their disagreement with the majority opinion. The three dissenting justices slammed the opinion as a tool that will now handicap prosecutors who are trying valiantly to force delinquent parents to pay to support their offspring. The fear is that all future prosecutions will now be hampered by the decision and that all a deadbeat parent needs to do is occasionally show up to then claim he or she “cared” for the kids.
What can the Minnesota legislature do?
Now the ball is in the Minnesota legislature’s court and there is tremendous pressure for lawmakers to act fast in reworking the language of the state’s law. As it currently stands, Minnesota is the only state in the nation where parents behind on their child support obligations do not have to fear being locked up.
Legislators claim that the matter will receive serious attention when the next legislative session begins. All those families that depend on monthly child support checks to make ends meet are likely eager to have the matter resolved quickly.
An experienced Minnesota family law attorney can help walk you through the difficult process of divorce, including offering advice on confusing financial issues such as alimony and helping negotiate emotional subjects like child custody arrangements. For more information on divorce in Minnesota, along with a variety of other topics, contact Joseph M. Flanders of Flanders Law Firm at (612) 424-0398.
Source: “Supreme Court: Man who ignored paying child support cannot be punished,” by The Associated Press, published at TheRepublic.com.
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