Child support during incarceration
Tossing v. Morgan
In brief
- Where it stands
- Petition Pending
Awaiting an order on the petition
- What it’s about
- Tossing’s petition seeks Supreme Court review of a Wisconsin child-support order that he says used earnings unavailable during his decade-plus imprisonment.
- What's at stake
- The dispute leaves unresolved whether Tossing’s support order can stay in place and whether a court must assess his ability to pay before refusing to change it.
Summary: written with AI from the case record.
What it's about
He challenges the lack of a finding about what he can pay and the Wisconsin court’s treatment of imprisonment as voluntary unemployment, despite a federal rule against that when setting or changing support.
Tossing says he has been imprisoned for more than a decade and earns only a few dollars a month.
Tossing’s petition also invokes a federal rule that says incarceration may not be treated as voluntary unemployment when setting or changing support orders.
Question presented
1. Whether the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment permits a State to keep in force, against a parent confined for more than a decade who earns a few dollars a month, a child-support order calculated on earnings he cannot have while confined, on the ground that his incarceration was the foreseeable result of his own crime, where the order can only generate arrears that no one expects to be paid during the children's minority and that will follow him for the rest of his life. 2. Whether due process requires a court that declines to modify such an order to make an express finding on the obligor's actual present and prospective ability to pay, as Turner requires before a court may act on an assumption that a parent can pay. 3. Whether a state court may treat a parent's incarceration as voluntary Unemployment in refusing to modify a support order when 45 C.F.R. § 302.56(c)(3), a binding condition of the State's federally funded child-support program, provides that incarceration "may not be treated as voluntary unemployment in establishing or modifying support orders," and the federal agency that wrote the rule expressly refused to except parents incarcerated for offenses against the supported child.
What happens next
The Court must decide whether to hear the case. No argument or decision date is set.
Documents
Docket activity
New analysis added
AI analysis generated: Case Briefing
Case data updated: summary, question_presented, generation_metadata
Case data updated: question_presented, extraction_metadata
Brief added: Petition
More questions
- How does due process fit into Tossing’s argument?
- He asks whether a court must find his present and future ability to pay before refusing to change the order.
- What federal rule does Tossing rely on?
- He points to a rule that bars treating incarceration as voluntary unemployment when setting or changing support.
- What does Tossing say about parents imprisoned for crimes against a child they support?
- His petition says the federal agency that wrote the rule refused to make an exception for them.
Sources
Primary materials plus reporting. Best-effort analysis: this explainer relies on a mix of primary materials and trusted secondary sources. Official filings and opinions remain authoritative.