Abused spouses get stuck with divorce bill
FRANKFORT, Ky. – A legislative panel swiftly approved a bill Thursday aimed at fixing an obscure provision of state law that forced a woman seeking to divorce her abusive spouse to pay for his lawyer because he was in prison for nearly killing her.
“My husband decided to beat me black and blue,” Jeanette McCue, a Washington County woman, told the state Senate Judiciary Committee. “He put a gun to my head and pulled the trigger. Thank God, I’m here.”
The committee voted unanimously to pass Senate Bill 68, sponsored by Sen. Morgan McGarvey, D-Louisville, after a few minutes of testimony, leaving a grateful McCue in tears.
“Maybe I can actually help someone else,” McCue said. “We’ve got people who don’t have a voice. This was horrible, but maybe some good is going to come out of it.”
“This is one of those loopholes that sometimes crop up,” said Sen. Whitney Westerfield, R-Hopkinsville, the committee’s chairman. “This is a good one to close.”
In McCue’s case, she got caught in a provision of state law that requires a party suing someone incarcerated to pay for a court-appointed lawyer for the inmate, who is considered indigent.
McCue was astonished to learn from her lawyer, Cassie Chambers, that included cases in which a victim of spousal abuse seeks a divorce from a spouse incarcerated over the abuse.
“In the process of trying to get divorced, I was told, ‘Ma’am, you’re going to have to pay for his attorney,’ ” she said. “That was a smack in the face.”
Though the bill wasn’t high for the court-appointed lawyer — about $160 — McCue said it was hard for her to come up with the money because her husband cleaned out their joint bank account and left the county after beating, choking and firing a gun at her. He missed, McCue said, because he was too drunk to aim.
He was arrested and pleaded guilty to charges related to the attack and is serving a 10-year sentence.
SB 68 would require the state to pay the legal costs of an inmate convicted of abuse in cases where the spouse who was the victim of the abuse sought a divorce.
McGarvey said the costs to the state would be minimal because such cases are infrequent. He said the change would be a tremendous help to victims of brutal attacks who must pay the costs of a state-appointed lawyer for their abuser.
“To me, that’s not justice,” he said. The matter came to light through the work of Chambers, with the Kentucky Equal Justice Center. As a legal aid lawyer, she was appointed to help McCue with her divorce.
Chambers said situations such as McCue’s are unusual, but after she came across two more such cases where she represented women who suffered domestic violence and sought divorces from incarcerated spouses, she decided to write an opinion piece about the law requiring them to pay the legal costs of their abusers.
It ran in the Lexington Herald-Leader on Jan. 2 and caught the eye of McGarvey, who said he was shocked to learn of the provision. He was unaware of it although he is a lawyer and has done some work in domestic violence cases.
“I read it and couldn’t believe it’s in the system,” he said.
The bill goes to the Senate for action.
“In the process of trying to get divorced, I was told, ‘Ma’am, you’re going to have to pay for his attorney.’ That was a smack in the face.” Jeanette McCue of Washington County