Equal Justice Under Law Joins Amicus Effort to Protect Social Security Benefits
Ms. I’s* husband was arrested by the Oklahoma Hollis Police Department for domestic assault and battery in October 2020. After the police arrested him, they brought in Ms. I for questioning. However, they did not question her about the assault and battery but instead about a crime that her husband claimed she had committed more than a year earlier. According to his report, Ms. I had withdrawn $1,500 using a debit card belonging to a deceased individual. Ms. I is unemployed because of an intellectual disability and has sustained herself—and her three kids—through Social Security Disability Insurance since around 2005. The police arrested her for this crime, which she pleaded guilty to in January 2022. The court gave her a one-year jail sentence, suspended on the condition that she pay over $2,000 in fines, restitution, and fees.
In the landmark 1983 case Bearden v. Georgia, the Supreme Court found that, “if the State determines a fine or restitution to be the appropriate and adequate penalty for the crime, it may not thereafter imprison a person solely because he lacked the resources to pay it.” The Court reasoned that “a probationer who has made sufficient [good faith] efforts to pay his fine and restitution . . . has demonstrated a willingness to pay his debt to society.” The Supreme Court’s holding binds all state courts.
Despite Ms. I’s willingness to pay her penalties, the Oklahoma trial court revoked her suspended sentence and sentenced her to a full year in jail in November 2025. At that point, she had paid $815 and earned over $155 in community service, a sum over a third of her total debt. She explained to the court that she needed more time to make payments because she had just relocated herself and her children out of unsafe housing. She had also explained that her sole source of income was Social Security Disability Insurance, as it had been for nearly two decades. Instead of adhering to Bearden by assessing Ms. I’s efforts to pay or considering alternative punishments, the court revoked Ms. I’s suspended sentence, sending her to jail for a one-year sentence.
The court’s order runs afoul of fundamental fairness because it strips Ms. I of her freedom based solely on Ms. I’s inability to pay fees she could not afford. Coupled with the fact that the trial court initially decided that incarceration was not a necessary punishment for Ms. I’s crime, the sentence amounts to taking away Ms. I’s liberty for no other reason than her poverty. Moreover, the incarceration order will only exacerbate the financial disadvantages faced by Ms. I and her family: it will have the effect of suspending Ms. I’s Social Security benefits while she is incarcerated, and will leave Ms. I’s three children without their mother. As far as ensuring fairness to the victim of Ms. I’s crime, the incarceration order means that Ms. I will spend a full year unable to pay off her remaining debts — a year that she otherwise would have spent attempting to make payments toward her restitution.
In an amicus brief in support of Ms. I’s appeal, Equal Justice Under Law and Still She Rises (a holistic defense nonprofit in Oklahoma) will argue that the court’s action was unlawful because it violated the Bearden rule, as well as Oklahoma state laws and the Social Security Act. Section 407 of the Social Security Act provides that “none of the moneys paid or payable” in Social Security benefits “shall be subject to execution, levy, attachment, garnishment, or other legal process” (emphasis added). The phrase “other legal process” has been interpreted by state courts to include contempt orders that compel payments of fines and restitution. That is, Social Security benefits are protected from being compelled to satisfy fines and restitution when defendants lack other income. As one Michigan court put it, “labeling the order as one of ‘contempt’ rather than ‘garnishment’ would exalt form over substance and ignore the reality of the circumstances.” The reality of the circumstances in Ms. I’s case is that Ms. I only receives $967 per month in Social Security Disability Insurance to provide for herself and her children. Despite her limited income, Ms. I has saved money and completed community service to pay off as much debt as she can, and she still intends to pay more. And despite the trial court’s ruling, the law protects Ms. I’s Social Security benefits, livelihood, and freedom.
Opponents of this policy may argue that victims of crime may also receive Social Security benefits and be financially worse off than perpetrators. However, as the Supreme Court penned in Kelly v. Robinson, “the criminal justice system is not operated primarily for the benefit of victims, but for the benefit of society as a whole.” Indigent defendants have legally protected entitlements that are “essentials, fully deserved, and in no sense a form of charity,” as legal scholar Charles A. Reich wrote. Perhaps in an earlier era, the poor were blamed for their poverty, but “today we see poverty as the consequence of large impersonal forces in a complex industrial society.” Social Security benefits are protected as essential property that people live from by necessity, not choice.
Ms. I’s Social Security benefits are protected by the Social Security Act, and her liberty is guarded by the Constitution and the Supreme Court’s Bearden holding. Equal Justice Under Law fights for its founding principle that it is not a crime to be poor: when people are punished for their poverty, the criminal justice system is unjust. We are proud to stand with Ms. I, Still She Rises, and indigent defendants across the country to hold American governments accountable to the promise of equal justice for all.
* Ms. I’s full name has been omitted from this post, as her criminal appeal remains ongoing.