Father sentenced to 6 months in jail for paying too much child support

[Total Eclipse]

http://www.sott.net/article/271748-F...-child-support

© FOX 26 Houston
Clifford Hall will go to jail for 6 months for doing too much for his son.



A father will spend half of 2014 behind bars for doing too much for his son. After overpaying child support and seeing his son too often - breaking terms that were secretly modified without his knowledge - a judge sentenced him to a lengthy jail sentence.

Clifford Hall has been doing his best to give care to his 11-year-old son, who lives with his ex-wife. He pays his child support and visits regularly. "I'm his father it's my responsibility to take care of him," Hall said.

Last November, his child support payments were paid in full. Sometime between then and now, the child support agreement between Hall and his wife was modified without his knowledge.

Hall wound up overpaying by $3,000, a fact that Harris County District Court Judge Lisa Millard found contemptible.

Another term that was modified without his knowledge was his visitation schedule. Subsequently, Hall was found to have over-visited his son.

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[SmileyFace]

LOL what?? That is so fucked up, wow.

[Inscrutable Banana]

[GunnyHighway]

"Stop doing the right thing! You're being too right!"

What a stupid thing to get put into jail for. The man is going to have his life ruined for trying to give a [BEEP] about his kid.

[James]

Beautiful, just beautiful. This reeeeally pisses me off. Harris County is where I live, the same county where this man was sentenced to jail. They're the ones that started garnishing my paycheck for child support, even though I've never missed or been late with a single payment since my wife and I separated. They're the same ones that neglected to notify me of a hearing to re-evaluate my child support case last year, but sent my wife two letters through the mail, left her a voicemail, and sent her a text message (there weren't any changes to the child support order at the hearing, but I still should have been notified so I could have shown up to represent myself). So I guess I'm really not all that surprised at this. Does Harris County have something against the fathers that keep up with their responsibilities to their children? Or what? I hope that Judge Lisa Millard gets so much bad publicity from this that she's forced to resign or is removed from office. I hope she is forced to reverse the decision, make a public apology and pay restitution. And I hope she spends the rest of her career scrubbing the floors of Harris County jail cells with a toothbrush. What the fuuuuuuuuuuck???

[Sagan]

Our universe is turning into a bizzaro world before our eyes.

[meeps]

Based on Hall's side of the story, the crux of the matter seems to be that (as maintained by Hall) a court agreement specifying child support and visitation terms was modified without his knowledge, resulting in his underpaying child support and taking custody of his son outside of the court-approved visitation schedule. When Hall found out about the modified terms, in order to

avoid jail time he quickly paid nearly $3,000 in back child support (despite, he claims, having been told during a court appearance several weeks earlier that he was all paid up) and agreed to pay the child's mother $3,000 in attorney's fees.

Nonetheless, Judge Lisa Millard found Hall in contempt of court and sentenced him to 180 days in county jail for some combination of his failure to pay required child support on time, his failure to follow the court's scheduled visitation times with his son, and/or his walking out of the courtroom in the middle of a hearing. (News accounts are still murky about which of these factors was the basis for the sentence.)

However, available court records indicate that Hall was straightforwardly held in contempt of court for failure to pay child support in a case which had a motion for contempt dating back to April 2013 (and a court document briefly glimpsed in the Houston television news report about the case shown above displays a header indicating Hall was indeed held in contempt for "for failure to pay child support"). The information presented in news accounts indicating that Hall owed nearly $3,000 in back child support and that the child's mother had incurred $3,000 in attorney's fees trying enforce their court agreement suggest that this was an long-running and/or ongoing support issue rather than a sudden and recent one.

Nothing presented in the original KRIV-TV news report on this case actually stated that Hall "overpaid" child support; it quite clearly said that he paid nearly $3,000 in "back child support," indicating that he was paying an amount already past due (even if he was previously unaware he owed it), not overpaying an amount he didn't yet owe. (Under Texas law, for an obligor to avoid contempt charges in a child support case, he must be current on all child support obligations at the time of the enforcement hearing, not just those originally pled in the motion to enforce.)

http://www.snopes.com/politics/crime/childsupport.asp