1/23/2024 0 Comments Michael davis jr highland park njThe New Jersey Supreme Court had ruled almost 30 years earlier in Rodriguez v. In addition, he felt the law was clearly on his side. He himself had been a custodial parent of a child whose mother failed to pay child support.ĭavid told me that he had brought the case because, in the course of visiting clients who were locked up over support arrears, he became aware of other individuals incarcerated for the same reason who had been jailed as long as a month or more even though they had no ability to pay and could not afford a lawyer.ĭavid took on the issue pro bono because he could not abide the injustice of locking up poor people for essentially being poor, creating a type of modern-day debtors’ prison. He had made it a point to have the lead plaintiff be a woman, Anne Pasqua, because he hated the term “deadbeat dads” and did not want that term used to describe the planitiffs and thus diminish the importance of what was at stake in the lawsuit. To say David was an underdog is an understatement. The named defendants were Chief Justice Deborah Poritz, Administrative Director of the Courts Richard Williams and Judge Gerald Council, sued as a family court judge and as stand-in for all the other judges. So there he was, a solo practitioner, with only three years’ experience as an attorney, taking on the whole state court system. in opposition to a motion to dismiss the Pasqua case, which he had filed earlier that year as a putative class action under federal civil rights law.ĭavid was pretty new at his job too, having graduated law school (Rutgers-Camden) only four years earlier, after which he spent a year clerking for Superior Court Judge Donald de Cordova in Family Court. I met David in November 2000, during my first year at the New Jersey Law Journal, in a federal court room in Trenton. It hurts them without benefiting their children. Even putting aside questions of fairness to the parents who owe the money, locking up poor people or taking away their right to drive in order to coerce them to pay defeats the purpose by interfering with their ability to earn the money they need to do so. But, as David was well aware, indigent parents might lack the ability to pay and also be unable to prove that fact to a judge because they also cannot afford a lawyer. Some might think that it is okay for the court system to come down hard on parents who are not meeting their legal obligations to their children. Once again, rather than appointing counsel, the court system ceased automatic suspensions as of April 1 of this year. Martinez, MER-L-1004-15, decided just about a year ago, in December 2018, Mercer County Assignment Judge Mary Jacobson ruled that courts cannot automatically suspend a parent’s driver’s license over unpaid child support without providing advance notice, opportunity to be heard and for indigent obligors, appointed counsel. Because the government was unable or unwilling to provide lawyers for them, it stopped locking up indigent people who owe child support. 127, decided by the NJ Supreme Court in 2006, held that before judges can send parents to jail to coerce them to pay child support at ability-to-pay hearings – also referred to as ”pay or stay” – the government must provide them with a lawyer if they cannot afford one on their own. In addition to the countless clients and colleagues whose lives he touched and improved through his practice as a family lawyer, David won two landmark court decisions that protect parents who owe child support from being locked up or barred from driving just because they cannot afford to pay. I was greatly saddened to learn a few weeks ago that David Perry Davis died unexpectedly on October 3, at the age of 55.ĭavid was a passionate and principled advocate who, probably more than any other individual, improved the quality of justice in the New Jersey court system for poor people who fall behind on child support.
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