I Am Guilty!!

"The Bill of Rights was provided as a BARRIER, to protect, the individual against the arbitrary extractions of the majorities, executives, legislatures, courts, sheriffs, and prosecutors, and it is the primary distinction between democratic and totalitarian processes."
--IN RE: STOLLER, 160 Fla. 769 (1948), 36 So.2d 443,445

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I AM GUILTY…..of the crime of having had a marriage go bad, getting divorced and being unable to pay alimony. For this heinous crime, I was given a lifetime sentence of hardship to pay for my crime and have been stripped of my rights. I have less rights than those of the most despicable of all criminals…the murderers, child killers, serial killers, rapists, bombers, drug dealers, etc.

Unlike a criminal, a person held in civil contempt:

1. Are not afforded the right of having counsel appointed to them in the event they can't afford it. In any case, they have to pay their for their ex-spouse's attorney.
3. They are presumed guilty until they prove themselves innocent.
4. They are not entitled to a trial with a jury of their peers.
5. They can be incarcerated with an indefinite sentence on the basis that they have the keys to their cell. For indigent persons or those with no ability to pay…there are no keys.

Yet now hundreds of thousands of men, whose only crime is that of a marriage gone bad have been or are facing jail and these same deprivation of rights. These people are not criminals, yet the family law system will treat them harsher than the worst criminal of society and make them suffer the lifetime stigma of incarceration with the worst of our society’s population.

Our jails are overloaded with hardened criminals and yet the courts fill them still more with non-criminal spouses who are unable to pay support. This is shameful travesty and an unnecessary expense to the taxpayers in an America that purportedly cherishes preserving our freedoms and constitutional rights.

Does this sound like the American freedoms that have been fought for since the Revolutionary War? If this is America….Are we really free?

I KNOW I AM NOT FREE. Most everyone wants to have closure for unpleasant events in their lives. But, there is no closure for people who get divorced so that they can get on with their lives. The court retains jurisdiction until the day they die. The court controls my life. I am supposed to file a new financial affidavit every time my financial situation changes. If I make money, they want to know so that they can take more of it from me. If I am unable to pay, then they want to force me to work, garnish my SS or throw me in jail.

Even though they put me in jail they can’t silence me because “they can’t silence the truth.” I speak with the voices of hundreds of thousands of spouses crying in the wilderness of the family law injustice system. Martyrs such Ghandi, Mandella, Martin Luther King, Jr, or Rosa Parks who spoke out against oppressive governments were put in jail for what they believed; yet they prevailed, just as I will.

The treatment of forcing spouses into a lifetime of servitude and peonage of paying alimony and is a mockery of the freedoms that hundreds of thousands of men have fought for and died to protect.

These are not the only freedoms and constitutional rights that have been violated by the family law system. For one, our right to privacy has been invaded by the courts interfering in the constitutionally protected area of the private decisions related to marriage.

For another, the laws and guidelines administering alimony are not clearly enumerated and allow judges too much discretion in deciding cases. There is no way in the world that these laws can be applied in a consistent and equitable manner.

Allowing the judges to have such wide latitude of discretion rather than having guidelines set up by the legislature permits them to administer the laws in such an arbitrary manner that, in effect, they are making the laws governing alimony on the fly. Doing that violates the separation of powers mandated by the constitution.

The law’s justification for granting alimony is that it says that it must protect the wife from becoming a ward of the state welfare system yet it has no problem with allowing paying spouses to become a ward of the state by forcing them into poverty in order to pay alimony. And, the courts have mandated it.

The law says we must protect the children from harm. What reasoning permits a child, when they reach the age of majority, to be allowed to be sent into the world on his own without any recourse from the courts, yet demands that a mature adult be supported for the rest of their lives? Alimony is intended to be for rehabilitative purposes to enable a spouse to get on their feet after dissolution, not support them for a lifetime. There is no justification for it.

If the law was so concerned with the welfare of one of the spouses that they granted lifetime alimony and support after the divorce, then why do they ignore the spouses of motorcycle riders who don’t wear helmets? The legislature has made no provision to force them to protect their spouse with insurance, etc. so that they would be provided for should they die in a motorcycle accident.

There is no logic in their conflicting philosophy unless you consider the money involved with family law cases. There can only be one motivation for all the injustices that prevail in the family law system and that is the motive of “profit.” No righteous-minded person would ever be able to justify the inequities that prevail in the name of profit.

The courts are clogged with the wasteful support cases. Because of this, attorneys in the family law system are able to extract billions of dollars from the parties through adversarial proceedings. This is unnecessary. This is not the way our founding fathers envisioned treatment of the families.

Lifetime alimony is wrong. I know it’s wrong, you know it’s wrong, the legislature knows it’s wrong, and the courts know it’s wrong. Established case law does not support lifetime alimony. The legislature and the family law courts should recognize this fact.

WOMEN RULE: MORE ON THE SUBJECT:
* 10 Industries That Women Rule

EXAMPLES OF A JUDICIAL SYSTEM AND JUDGES GONE AWRY:
* No law for 'taking' of man's life
* Judge won't cut alimony for judicial candidate

EGREGIOUS EXAMPLES OF OUR “INJUSTICE” SYSTEM
* More Bad Judges

INTERESTING READING:
* Would You Sleep With This Woman??

Be sure to visit these sites: www.abolish-alimony.org/ and www.alimonycentral.org