What happens to a person&#39;s social security account if they die and have no survivors? What law determines where the money goes? Where would it go if there were no survivors to pay the benefit to?
The relevant law is encoded at 47 USC Ch. 7. The money doesn't &quot;go&quot; anywhere other than into the US Treasury. You are required by law to pay a percentage of earned income in the US forever. Independently, you might get an entitlement to draw benefits, depending on whether you are old enough (or are disabled or blind) and have enough &quot;credits&quot; (earned enough money). Certain people can receive money owing to your qualification (mnior children, spouse, dependent parent), see here. There is no individual balance, as there would be with an IRA or other savings plan.
A babysitter is a household employee in the IRS's parlance. This means that: [Y]ou may need to withhold and pay social security and Medicare taxes, pay federal unemployment tax, or both. To find out, read Table 1. You don't need to withhold federal income tax from your household employee's wages. But if your employee asks you to withhold it, you can. The thresholds in Table 1 (for 2021) are: If you pay more than $2,300 in a calendar year to any one household employee, you must withhold Social Security &amp; Medicare taxes from that employee's wages, as well as pay the employer's share of these taxes. If you pay more than $1,000 in a quarter to any one household employee, you must pay federal unemployment tax. In addition, you are liable for Virginia state unemployment tax as well. As noted in the above document, you do not have to withhold income taxes from your household employees. You and your employee can agree to a withholding arrangement for income taxes, but it's not required. This doesn't mean that your employee isn't liable for income taxes on these wages, it just means that they're not your concern. Finally, note than wages paid to anyone who is under the age of 18 at any time in 2021, and whose work for you is not their primary occupation, are exempt from Social Security &amp; Medicare taxes. Such wages are still subject to federal unemployment taxes, though. (And possibly also Virginia unemployment taxes, though I haven't checked.) See the &quot;Wages Not Counted&quot; subsections within the sections on &quot;Social Security and Medicare Taxes&quot; and &quot;Federal Unemployment Taxes&quot; in the above-linked publication.
You're missing some pretty important details in describing the facts of this case. The most important of which is: What were the agreed terms upon which Alice obtained possession of the car prior to paying? Your description says: Alice takes the car and doesn't pay. If that's literally true, then this case is both criminal theft and the tort of conversion — not breach of contract. Since the remainder of your question references a breach of contract, then I have to conclude that the fact as you stated it is not literally correct and there is some important missing detail about the terms upon which Alice was in possession of the car when she crashed it. So, I will have to invent some scenarios that would fit two other facts you describe: The jury awarded Bob $5,000. The jury found Alice to be in breach of contract. The following are the scenarios I can think of that would match the facts (as I understand them and speculated where important details are missing from the question). Maybe this is a small claims court and the damages are capped at $5,000? I never heard of a jury trial in small claims court but I guess it could be possible. Or maybe it was actually a judge and use of the term jury was careless or otherwise inaccurate? Maybe the terms under which Alice was in possession of the car when she crashed it put the parties in position where they effectively shared liability or risk of damage to the car? Like maybe Bob (or both parties) was/were required to carry insurance on the car while Alice was "test driving" it. I only use the term "test driving" as a placeholder for whatever she was doing with the car prior to paying for it which is left unclear by the question. Maybe Bob was found to have contributed to the breach of contract by something he did or didn't do. Similar to the above speculation about insurance. All this would be much easier to analyze if we knew how and under what terms Alice came to possess the car. Maybe there was only $5k of damage done to the car? Or, alternatively, the car was only found to be worth $5k and, for whatever reason (again, which we can not fully analyze given only the partial set of facts presented) the liquidated value of the car was the basis for the damage award and not the contracted price. (Consistent with @jimsug's comment.) I can easily imagine a scenario where Bob and Alice are close friends or family so the entire transaction is handled very loosely and informally and Bob let's Alice drive the vehicle while she is gathering the money to pay him. In this case, the jury might decide Bob shares the liability with Alice since the terms of the sales contract did not transfer the risk of liability to Alice during the time she was driving prior to payment.
Is this realistic? Yes. The dramatic performance plays out in the same way that it would in the U.S. Court system. The actual killing of the wife would be 'legal', so can he be charged for murder for something that has been done legally, only because they can prove is intent to kill her before that? Especially since he has already been acquitted of that fact. Mostly, this is an issue of causation and not double jeopardy. From a double jeopardy perspective, the crime of murder is not complete until the person dies, and they have not be tried for murder, so this is a different crime that had not occurred until after the attempted murder trial was over. Causation Issues Even if the immediate cause of the wife's death is withdrawal of life support, the shooting could still be a legally sufficient cause of the wife's death. For example, suppose that you shoot someone and the hospital can't give the victim a blood transfusion because the victim has blood type O- (universal donor) which can only receive blood from other people with blood type O-, and the hospital, due to negligence on the part of a hospital administrator, has run out out of type O- blood. The fact that the victim would not have died if the hospital has not negligently failed to have type O- blood on hand does not provide a defense to murder on the part of the person who shot her. While terminating life support is "legal" it also constitutes a non-judicial finding with legal effect on the part of the person authorizing it and the physicians signing off on the decision, the further medical care would have been futile and that the person whose life support was terminated was already dead in key material respects, even though they would not be dead for purposes of a murder charge until life support is terminated. When death is a natural and foreseeable result of action that causes physical harm, the death is caused by the act that causes the physical harm. Something else that causes death would have to be a "superseding cause" and not just an additional cause of death. Thus, the fact that life support was terminated legally does not mean that she cannot be a murder victim. Indeed, many murder victims are people who are on life support for some period of time and then have that life support terminated because it is futile to continue medical care and the person is already "brain dead" or something equivalent to that. Collateral Estoppel Issues Double jeopardy does carry with it a related concept of "collateral estoppel" which provides that facts necessarily decided in one criminal case cannot be decided differently in a subsequent, related criminal case in some circumstances. But, collateral estoppel applies only when the facts in the prior criminal case were necessarily decided on the merits in the prior criminal case. Acquittal of criminal charged does not necessarily include a determination that someone was innocent of the charges. The fact that he was acquitted of attempted murder does not mean that the jury found that he didn't attempt or intend to murder her. In particular, a dismissal of criminal charges as a result of a technicality that excluded evidence related to an element of the crime for which there was an acquittal, is not a determination on the merits that a particular element of a crime was actually absent, so it would not be binding in the subsequent criminal case for murder. An acquittal does not mean that every element of the prior criminal charges was found not to be present. Collateral estoppel arising from the double jeopardy right, in contrast, might be a ground for dismissal of the murder case, if the man's primary (and perhaps only) defense to the attempted murder case had been that he had established the affirmative defense that someone else committed the murder, or that he had an alibi that made it impossible for him to have committed the murder. Then, the jury would have found on the merits that this defense, equally applicable to the murder case, had already been established.
The official judgements do not reveal the funding for these lawyers; so where can I find this information? Nowhere. The commercial arrangements between lawyers and their clients are private and confidential like any other business transactions. You have no more right to know this then you do to know how your neighbour pays their mortgage. how could she have funded litigation in the EWHC and then EWCA before the UKSC? She may have rich parents or another benefactor who has in interest in her or the outcome of the case. She may have won the lottery. She may be the heiress of a dead rich uncle. By the way, "having" student loans does not mean you "need" student loans. Interest rates on student loans are cheap - if I need to pay $10,000 for a course and have $10,000 earning 5%, I would be nuts to use that if I could take out a loan at 3%.
You can't sue her for not having insurance. You sue for the damage you suffered. You can name her as a defendant alongside her son on the theory that she contributed to the accident by letting her son use the car, and then let the judge sort out who gets landed with the liability. Depending on the rules in your jurisdiction you might have to pay her travel expenses and/or lost wages if the judge decides she wasn't to blame (and the same for her son, but that sounds like a slam-dunk). However you might be better off going for victim restitution. That way the order gets made as part of the criminal case against the son. Less hassle for you, and the state authorities are responsible for actually getting the money out of them. Edit: It turns out that Idaho has the Family Car Doctrine in its law, so the mother is legally liable for her son's accident (thanks to ohwilleke for the pointer).
I would think that this would be treated the same as lost property. In most places, if you notice lost property (for example because the postman hands it to you) you have the choice of ignoring it (don't touch it, don't accept it from the postman), or you have to make reasonable efforts to find the owner and return it. If you as the sender had no idea who received the package so you cannot contact them, and there was nothing in the package identifying the sender, the receiver would be able to keep the package when their efforts of finding the owner fail. But if you manage to contact them, then the receiver knows the owner, so there is no legal excuse to keep the package.
Bob’s estate can be sued Bob the human is dead but Bob the legal person continues, at least for a while. People who were damaged by Bob the human can sue Bob’s estate for restitution. Assuming that Bob would like his assets Togo to his heirs instead of these people, that acts as a disincentive. This does not apply to criminal sanctions.