Del. Kathleen Dumais (D-15) has a lot on her plate this week. Eight of the bills she is working on come up for a hearing on Feb. 19, many of them dealing with her specialty, family law.
Child support is featured in one bill. Under the current law, if a parent is in arrears in making their child-support payments, their driver’s license must be revoked. This can make it difficult for these parents to go to work and earn the money for the payments.
“What happens is this becomes a never-ending cycle,” Dumais said.
She wants to change the law to allow judges some discretion in applying the law. “Maybe we allow them to use their driver’s license to go to work,” Dumais said.
She is also developing a bill (HB 640) to close a loophole in child neglect cases. Currently the law forbids children under 8 to be left alone, locked in a house or car without a babysitter.
Dumais was hearing that people were trying to avoid prosecution by not locking the child in. She is proposing legislation which would remove the language that requires the child to be “locked in.”
Dumais recognizes that this would make it, technically, illegal for a parent to walk down the driveway to get the mail while the child was inside, but she doesn’t think this will be a problem.
“It’s not an attempt to take away the common sense of the parent,” Dumais said. “This is designed for people who just leave the kid alone.”
One other bill, which she expects to be controversial, will require a non-custodial parent to continue to pay child support until the child is 21, if the child is in college. “It is controversial, but I think it’s worth exploring,” Dumais said.
She is also working on closing a loophole in the drunk driving laws. Under current law, higher penalties are implemented if an accident victim sustains “life-threatening” injuries.
However, the term is not defined in state laws which Dumais says has allowed people to skirt the tougher penalties. “Because there’s no definition in the code, the judge didn’t convict them,” she said. The new bill (HB 210) will change the language to read “serious physical injury” which is defined in the code.
<1b>— Ari Cetron