Judge allows thousands to join child support lawsuit
Thousands of parents facing possible jail time for failing to pay child support can join a lawsuit that says lawyers should be appointed to represent them if unable to afford counsel, a judge has ruled.
In a Dec. 30 order, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Jerry Baxter granted class-action status to a suit filed last year against the state by five parents who had been jailed for child-support debt.
Georgia is one of the few states nationwide that does not provide lawyers for indigent parents facing civil contempt in child-support proceedings. The state already struggles, because of budget shortfalls, to provide lawyers to indigent people charged with criminal offenses.
The lawsuit contends Georgia is creating modern-day debtor's prisons for those jailed when they have no ability to pay because they have lost jobs or are disabled and unable to find work.
As of October, Baxter noted, about 845 parents were incarcerated in Georgia for child-support debt in cases filed by lawyers on behalf of the state Department of Human Services. More than 3,500 parents have been jailed, without legal representation, since the beginning of last year, the order said.
Sarah Geraghty, a lawyer with the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights, which represents the parents who filed suit, said she was pleased with Baxter's ruling.
"Fairness requires that an indigent parent be appointed a lawyer in a case in which the state entity trying to send him to jail is represented by experienced, learned counsel," Geraghty said.
The state will appeal Baxter's ruling to the Georgia Supreme Court, said Lauren Kane, a spokeswoman for the state Attorney General's Office.
If the suit prevails, Georgia must set funds aside to pay for appointed counsel. North Carolina, for example, pays more than $3 million per year to appointed lawyers in child-support cases.
The Fulton County suit seeks lawyers for indigent parents in civil contempt actions brought by state attorneys on behalf of DHS. It would not apply to cases involving parents who retain lawyers and seek to hold their former spouses in contempt for failing to pay child support.
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a South Carolina man jailed for failing to pay child support was not entitled to have a lawyer appointed to represent him. In that case, the child's mother was not represented by a state attorney and the state's social services agency was not a party in the case. The high court noted it was not deciding whether counsel should be provided when state social services agencies are involved and represented by lawyers.
The Supreme Court also said that 70 percent of child-support delinquency cases nationwide involve parents with either no reported income or income of less than $10,000 a year.
Baxter's ruling cited an affidavit from Oswaldo Vicente, a Gordon County man who is a native of Guatemala with limited understanding of the English language. After losing his job at a carpet mill, Vicente said, he was jailed twice last year after attending hearings in which he was provided neither an interpreter nor a lawyer to represent him and where the state was represented by counsel.
About the Author
Bill Rankin has been an AJC reporter for more than 30 years. His father, Jim Rankin, worked as an editor for the newspaper for 26 years, retiring in 1986. Bill has primarily covered the state’s court system, doing all he can do to keep the scales of justice on an even keel. Since 2015, he has been the host of the newspaper’s Breakdown podcast.
