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Daniel Acker, Jr. gets $520,00 in pension in prison

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

By pleading guilty to sexually abusing six young girls over a twenty year period, retired Alabaster teacher Daniel Acker, Jr. surrendered his freedom for the next 17 years.

On top of that, the state has stripped his school bus license and any chance his expired teaching certificate could ever be renewed.

“So he'll never teach in a school or will he drive a bus nor will he be a substitute teacher in the state of Alabama and hopefully nowhere else,” Alabama Department of Education spokesman Michael Sipsey said.

One thing Acker's plea will not cost him, however, is his teacher's pension.

That's right.

Every month he serves for violating fourth grade girls, he will receive a respectable retirement check from the state.

According to the Teacher's Retirement System, Daniel Acker, Jr.'s pension check is worth $2,550.92 per month before taxes and insurance.

That means during his 17 years in an Alabama prison for 8 counts of sexual abuse he will be paid $520,387 by the State of Alabama.

If he lives to be 78 years old, which is the current American life expectancy, that number jumps to $857,109.

That's nearly a million dollars the State of Alabama will pay a man who's guilty of victimizing half a dozen girls in his own classroom and a chunk of that comes from you, the taxpayer.

How is that possible?

We took that question to the man in charge of managing the pension plan for all state employees, Dr. David Bronner.

“We send people in jail, right now, a check and that to me is sort of ridiculous in the case of Dr. Johnson is a good case, the junior college guy or now this pervert, Acker who absolutely does not accept anything but disdain from the public as well as myself or anybody else who's thinking,” Bronner argued.

Bronner said under current Alabama law, every state employee, no matter what crime they commit, is entitled to their state retirement pay.

That is about to change though.

This week lawmakers passed Senate Bill 213 which mandates that state employees in the future, “Shall forfeit the right to retirement benefits, and shall be entitled to a refund of his or her retirement contributions plus applicable interest upon a guilty plea...of a felony offense related to a person's public position."

In Acker's case, the amount of his personal contributions plus interest equals about $70,000.

However, since his plea came before the bill passed, he will continue to receive retirement checks until the day he dies.

“That's probably the reason he pleaded guilty because he knew that we were going to take it away from him so we continued to do it but we can't do anything about the past. And like I said we've tried on two occasions to change the law, we were unsuccessful but you have to have cases like this get the legislature to help us do what's right,” Bronner concluded.

The third time, they passed it, but in Daniel Acker, Jr.’s case, they were a few days and hundreds of thousands of dollars too late.

Senate Bill 213 was sent to the Governor's office around lunch Wednesday.

Bentley's office tells us while he has supported the bill, they must still examine its final form before signing it into law in next week or so.

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