Tag: law

Holy crap! You can go to prison for not paying your parents’ medical bills!

Posted on by Jody Bruchon

I just found this thread on the /r/LegalAdvice subreddit about a concept called “filial responsibility” which basically means that parents and/or their adult children can be held legally responsible for paying medical bills incurred by each other. Apparently 29 states in the USA have filial responsibility laws on the books but I (like many other people) have never heard a thing about them before today.

Filial responsibility is super draconian and scary shit.

Interest in filial responsibility laws have slowly resurfaced after finalization of a Pennsylvania court case where a son was held legally liable for his mother’s $93,000 nursing home bill. Before this case came about, these laws had long since fallen out of any sort of actual enforcement in a similar vein to anti-sodomy or “crime against nature” laws that technically make it a felony to have oral or anal sex with a human. I started digging a bit and found out that these laws could be a nasty time bomb in North Carolina because NC criminal law says that not taking care of your parents if the State decides you should be able to do so is grounds for giving you a criminal record.

That’s right! Don’t pay for your parents’ medical bills? Class 2 misdemeanor, have fun in prison.

I am a firm believer that no person in a free society should ever be held liable for debts (financial or moral) incurred by any other person and that debtors’ prisons should be completely abolished. If you believe the same thing, contact your state government representatives and make sure they know you want these laws stricken from the books.

Law enforcement and NSA/FBI/CIA/SBI use corporations to skirt the Fourth Amendment

Posted on by Jody Bruchon

I don’t have much to say on this subject (there isn’t much to it in the first place) but this is a trend I’ve noticed for some time now and I wanted to bring it up in a post. I’m not a lawyer, so don’t take any of this as legal advice. Comments would be nice!

Law enforcement and investigative agencies seem to be increasingly using corporations to get around Constitutional protections against search and seizure. The logic most frequently used is that if a corporation takes something or collects something from you, a search warrant can be served on the corporation and your rights relating to those somethings don’t exist anymore, because the warrant was served on the corporation and it is that corporation’s rights which are engaged. It doesn’t matter how they end up with it or that it should be seen as yours; once a business takes something from you, it’s fair game for authorities and you have no recourse.

I have a major problem with this.

On one end, you could take the example of an employer noticing your bag of marijuana, taking it from you, and calling the police. On the other (less tangible) end, you could discuss law enforcement asking Google, Yahoo, or even a torrent tracker for a list of your searches. Either way, the company takes something from you and gives it to law enforcement, bypassing your rights against unlawful search and seizure and depriving you of most legal processes to fight the evidence after the fact. If a cop illegally searches your car and finds weed, you can challenge the search on fourth amendment grounds, but if a co-worker or manager does the same thing and then hands it off to the cops, there is almost nothing you can do about the search. The Google search hand-off is practically the same thing in virtual space.

I would (at a minimum) like to see the law changed to explicitly extend fourth amendment protections to cover situations where a third party is used as a proxy in the seizure. I have no idea how this would work out in practice, but I’m hoping someone who happens upon this will show up with some insightful comments.