In cutting off drivers’ licenses for child support nonpayment, Maryland often makes mistakes and denies due process. So now it is facing lawsuits from Maryland Legal Aid. The Baltimore Banner reports:
On July 28, 2023, Donte Peoples was working as a truck driver and making a delivery at Grissom Air Reserve Base in Indiana when he encountered a problem. A security guard, he said, informed him that his driver’s license was suspended for unpaid child support. The development set off a chain of events that “totally wiped out everything.” He lost his job, fell behind on rent and was evicted from his apartment. “I try to be strong, and I try to just hope for the best and try to push forward,” Peoples, 35, said, “but it’s just really hard.”
Peoples, though, did not owe any child support. He had custody of his 15-year-old son, Donte Jr., and a Baltimore judge ruled in 2017 that he was no longer required to make payments.
Maryland Legal Aid, the state’s largest provider of free civil legal services, alleges that what happened to Peoples is not an isolated incident. The private nonprofit law firm asserts that the state is relying on a broken automated system and routinely suspending driver’s licenses for unpaid child support without due process and in cases in which it is not permitted to do so under the law. Attorneys with Legal Aid this week put the state on notice of legal action in three cases. They’re seeking compensation for their clients and an injunction to prevent this from happening to them and other parents in the future….
Under the law, the Maryland Child Support Administration can notify the Motor Vehicle Administration if people with regular driver’s licenses are 60 days or more behind on child support, or those with commercial driver’s licenses are 120 days or more behind.
The child support administration is required to send written notice to people that includes their right to request an investigation on several grounds. Those include if the information is incorrect, if a driver’s license suspension would be an impediment to current or potential employment or if individuals have a disability that prevents them from being able to work….In 2023, Maryland suspended about 20,512 driver’s licenses related to outstanding child support. The NAACP Maryland State Conference reported that Black parents comprised 71% of these suspensions from 2015-2020.
Stacy Bensky, a Legal Aid attorney who represents Peoples, said parents often do not receive notice that their driver’s license is going to be suspended — a violation of their right to due process. People often find out, she said, after the police pull them over for driving on a suspended license. Bensky said the state also suspends driver’s licenses even when people fall under one of the exceptions in the law. “Their system is blatantly illegal,” Bensky said. “It operates as if the law doesn’t exist.”
Some other states are even worse. As a matter of deliberate policy, they suspend driver’s licenses over child support, even when it means the driver will lose his job and become even less able to pay child support due to being unemployed. That has led to class-action lawsuits in states like Missouri by parents whose drivers licenses were taken away when they were unable (not unwilling, but unable) to pay the child support they were ordered to pay (such as when their monthly child support obligations were kept high even after they lost their jobs or ended up in a lower-paying job).
It also increases the amount of unpaid child support by keeping parents from finding a job that pays enough for them to pay all the child support they owe. Low-income people with cars have access to 30 times as many jobs as low-income people dependent on public transit, noted transportation expert Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute: “Transit speeds average just 15 mph while average auto speeds in most cities are twice that.” Moreover, “autos allow users to go where and when they want to go, while transit riders must go where and when the transit goes, which often means less direct routes than they could drive.”
But very often, people’s driver’s licenses are suspended when they are behind on their child support payments. That leaves them even less able to work and pay their child support. Often, they get behind on their child support because they lost their job. Losing their drivers’ license makes it even harder for them to find a job to resume paying their child support. The Urban Institute noted years ago that only 4% of noncustodial parents manage to get their monthly child support payments reduced when they lose their job, even though jobless people can’t afford to pay as much as people with jobs. Their unpaid child support just grows and grows, leading to them losing their driver’s license and access to most potential jobs.
Child support obligations are often set too high to begin with. When California commissioned the Urban Institute to investigate why parents were often behind on their child support, it reported that the number one reason for arrearages was that “orders are set too high relative to ability to pay.”
As a lawyer described in the Times-Dispatch, parents also sometimes get jailed for not paying child support that they are simply unable to pay. In theory, inability to pay is a defense to being jailed, but noncustodial parents facing jail typically do not have a lawyer or understand the rules of evidence. Courts often fail to accord them even the minimal due-process safeguards mandated by the Supreme Court’s decision in Turner v. Rogers. Some court rulings have cited a father’s failure to pay for an appeal bond as a basis for not hearing his appeal of his incarceration, even though a parent who is too broke to pay child support will also be too broke to afford the cost of an appeal bond. That can put low-income parents in a Catch-22 situation.
When parents are jailed due to their inability to pay excessive child support obligations, their relatives may have to empty their pockets to pay off the arrears, to get their family member out of jail. It can look a lot like holding someone for ransom. A South Carolina judge called this the “magic fountain” — jail a person who couldn’t pay their child support, and, as if by magic, the money may appear, courtesy of desperate relatives.
But if you live in a poor black neighborhood or rural area, there may be no prosperous relative around to ransom you from jail. In 2002, Murray Steinberg of the Family Resolution Council observed that a majority of parents jailed in Virginia over child-support were black, even though blacks were only a minority of those ordered to pay child support. He also said that excessive child-support obligations were driving African-American men into the black market. He served on Virginia’s child-support guidelines review panel.
