Word: wisconsin
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...procreating and making it an offense. In April, Texas District Judge J. Manuel Banales ordered Torres not to have sex with anyone, minor or adult, until he married--or "you will go to prison for life." He expressed a fear that Torres would be a deadbeat dad. The Wisconsin Supreme Court was marginally more lenient with Oakley last week, merely sustaining a lower-court ruling that would jail him for eight years if he fathered another child without proving he could support his entire brood...
Laws against deadbeat parents have toughened, but scofflaws still owe $11 billion a year, and anger at chronic offenders is growing. Oakley owes $25,000, despite civil citations and garnishments. The Wisconsin court's four-person majority (all male) focused on his behavior. Wrote Justice William Bablitch: "It is overwhelmingly obvious that any child he fathers will be doomed to a future of neglect, abuse or worse...
...Walsh Bradley regretted that "for the first time in our state's history," the court had "allowed the birth of a child to carry criminal sanctions." In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court declared procreation a basic human right in 1942. It reaffirmed it in 1978 by overturning a Wisconsin law forbidding child-support-delinquent citizens to marry if they could not show that their children could be kept off welfare. Similarly, activists like the A.C.L.U.'s Catherine Weiss say Oakley's sentence "runs dangerously close to having a financial test for parenthood." Such fears are not utterly unfounded. Between...
...just property databases. Wisconsin has most of its arrest and court records online. (I discovered that a former law-school classmate of mine has had two traffic violations and was a defendant in a civil lawsuit.) The federal courts have put many of their records online through a system called Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER). Among the data available: Social Security numbers; financial assets, which often must be revealed in court proceedings; and the names and ages of minor children...
...More than 25 states have felony statutes for animal cruelty. Cases like this are pretty routine, but this one got a lot of attention because it involved road rage and a cute dog. Still, you could do less and get even more. A Wisconsin man is currently facing 15 years in prison for allegedly mistreating cows. He's just a failing farmer who says he couldn't afford to feed his cows. But he still has legal responsibilities...