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ANCPR News Release

Parents Rights Group Targets Indiana Judge

ANCPR demands release of Gordon Stuart from house arrest

 

Sunday, September 12, 1999

ANCPR, the Alliance for Non-Custodial Parents Rights, has called upon its membership to initiate a letter writing campaign targeting judge K. Mark Lloyd of the Johnson County Circuit Court, Franklin, Indiana. Gordon Stuart was released from a work camp only to be imprisoned in his own house and forced to wear a monitor anklet. ANCPR is demanding that Judge Lloyd release Mr. Stuart from his sentence of house arrest and order the removal of his monitor anklet immediately.

The contempt order is for both current child support and arrearages due for a 21 year old daughter from a previous marriage who is now in college. Stuart is forced to sign over his entire pay check to Johnson County, Indiana, to cover the child support deduction of $110 per week, which when combined with the $50.00 charge for in home monitoring amounts to overe 75% of his take home pay. This situation has caused an extreme hardship on his second wife and twelve year old daughter. To make matters worse, Stuart’s wife recently lost her job of 28 years due to a reduction in force, and now must now devote full time to caring for their daughter who suffers from a seizure disorder. The young girl currently experiences from 5 to 6 seizures a day. Stuart’s own health is also bad and he is under doctor’s care for a heart condition which is aggravated by sugar diabetes and degenerative vascular disease.

In their letter to Judge Lloyd, ANCPR compares Stuart’s house arrest to a form of debtor’s prison, declaring that it is one thing to apply blind justice to rapists and murders, but quite another to do so to parents in Family Court. ANCPR is also concerned with the growing invasion of privacy and erosion of the Constitutional rights of parents.

"Turning parents into criminals does absolutely nothing for our nation’s children," says Lowell Jaks, the founder of ANCPR. "Replacing debtor’s prison with house arrest, and a ball and chain with a monitor anklet is hardly indicative of an advanced civilization. I don’t like what this says about our society," adds Jaks.

This is not the first letter writing campaign organized by ANCPR. In a previous campaign, ANCPR supporters innundated Judge Schoenberg of Los Angeles, California with letters demanding the release of prominent father’s rights activist Christopher Robin. Judge Schoenberg subsequently released Robin from jail, and was later disqualified from hearing the case. Robin is still free.

ANCPR was founded in 1995. It is a nonprofit, nonsectarian organization devoted to preserving and promoting the civil rights of noncustodial parents. It has members in all 50 states. It has pioneered the use of the internet to unite a disparate and utterly marginalized constituency. It’s Internet based Legislative Action Center has in only a few months of its introduction resulted in over 10,000 letters from non-custodial parents to their representatives in Congress. It can be found on the World Wide Web at ancpr.org.

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