It was an unimaginable tragedy — the loss of her son, daughter-in-law and 4-month-old grandson in an April 13, 2021, car crash in Missouri — that pushed Cecilia Williams into advocacy. A month after visiting the crash site marker on a Missouri state highway, Williams recalled, she knew she had to channel her grief into strength for her two surviving grandsons, Bentley and Mason — and for others affected by reckless, fatal crashes. Working with other advocates, she helped write legislation called “Bentley and Mason’s Law,” often shortened to Bentley’s Law, that would require convicted drunken drivers to pay child support for children who lose one or both parents in a fatal accident, Stateline reports. The bill was introduced in her home state of Missouri in 2022, but it failed. Still, similar legislation is spreading in U.S. statehouses, says Becky Iannotta of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), one of the major advocacy groups for Bentley’s Law. Three states, Kentucky, Tennessee and Texas, have passed some version of Bentley’s Law. Since 2022, at least 20 states have considered legislation similar to it.
This year, proposals have been introduced in at least a dozen states: Arizona, Florida, Hawaii, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, New Jersey, South Carolina, South Dakota, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin. In some states, questions over how the law would be applied and which courts would set the penalties have stalled legislation. For Williams, Bentley’s Law is about holding people accountable for driving drunk and guaranteeing financial support for children who have lost providers — and her mission is to get it enacted in all 50 states. Under the model legislation, courts would determine the amount of child support to be paid after a conviction of driving under the influence. Support payments would be made to a surviving spouse or a guardian who is raising the children of victims, usually until those kids turn 18. In Arizona, state Rep. Selina Bliss, the bill’s sponsor, said that tying long-term financial consequences to drunken driving offenses can be a deterrent. “The long-term impact hopefully will be that people who plan to drink will plan for another way home than driving themselves,” she said. “We want people to understand that the consequences of drinking and driving could be killing or injuring someone, and that the person in the other car could be a child, or a young child’s parents.”