The Ninth Circuit made the world a safer place for parents of delinquent children when it held that none of the costs of incarceration qualify as a “domestic support obligation” that would render them nondischargeable under Section 523(a)(5).
The opinion is laced with criticism of the California state government for putting much of the cost of local government on the shoulders of the poor.
The appeal stemmed from a California state law making parents liable up to $30 a day for feeding and clothing a minor child in jail. The statute also makes parents liable for criminal defense costs.
The county billed a mother more than $16,000, which covered part of the cost of her son’s incarceration. Although she sold her home to pay $9,500, the county got a judgment for almost $10,000.
The mother filed bankruptcy, listed the debt, and got a discharge in chapter 7. Contending that the judgment was for a domestic support obligation, or DSO, so that it was automatically excepted from discharge under Section 523(a)(5), the county continued attempting to collect the judgment.
The mother hauled the county into bankruptcy court for a declaration that the debt was discharged. The bankruptcy and the district courts both ruled in favor of the county. On appeal to the Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote the opinion on Aug. 10 reversing and holding that incarceration costs are not DSOs.
Judge Reinhardt said that bankruptcy allows someone to shed “one’s debts, but not one’s most fundamental family obligations.” Referring to the statute, he said the question was whether the debt was “in the nature of . . . support.” The amendments in 2005 affecting DSOs in Section 101(14A) only allowed collection by government agencies but did not alter the definition of DSOs, he said.
Judge Reinhardt said that even the costs of clothing and food were “incidental” to the “larger governmental purpose” of “public safety” and “reducing crime.” “In short,” he said, “the purpose of [the son’s] detention was to enforce criminal law.”
The debt was not a DSO because “the principal purpose of the county’s custody over [her] son is public safety,” even though the state legislature characterized the liability as support. In that regard, Judge Reinhardt said that “the way a state characterizes debt is relevant, though not conclusive.”
The opinion ends with criticism of the state government for attempting to collect from the mother, who had committed no crime. Judge Reinhardt said that making the debt nondischargeable “would only detract from [the mother’s] ability to fulfill her family support obligations.”
He went further, saying that burdening the mother “hardly enhances the future welfare of the child.” By “relentlessly pursuing” the mother, the state was raising “yet another obstacle to [the mother’s] efforts to provide her son with the support about which the county claims to be so deeply concerned.”
The concluding pages of the opinion include a critique of “a recurring problem of public entities imposing fiscal burdens on those who can least afford them.” The appeals court lists parking tickets, police citations, court-imposed fees and fines as being among regressive taxes that “lay a debt trap for the poor.”