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Indiana Forms: Affidavit for Contempt and Contempt Citation

The Delaware County Clerk has some forms that are of importance and use for family law cases.

I mentioned both a contempt affidavit and citation in Enforcing Parenting Time: Contempt. The Delaware County Clerk site has both an Affidavit for Citation and a Citation. These are in PDF formats.

The Affidavit is very bare bones, perhaps too much. If you want to use it outside of Delaware County, you will need to change the county and cause number (the cause number is whatever number you were originally given for your case) and add the names of the parties.

What I do not like is that the law requires a specific statement of the facts supporting the contempt. You are very much on your own writing this up properly.

The citations need some of the same sort of work - add the parties' names, change to the local county - and one more. The citation goes with the affidavit. The citation must give the name and address of the person who is to receive the affidavit. No name and no address, then the affidavit sits in the court's file.

Notice also that the citation has blanks for the date and time of the hearing. You will need to contact the court to get this information. Fill it in and then you are ready to file.

One final point, you need to check with the court to make sure that the opposing party was served with the citation and affidavit. No service means that there cannot be a hearing. One of our constitutional rights is the right to due process. Due process means having notice of court proceedings (which is why we filed the citation and affidavit) and the right to be heard (at the hearing). No service means no notice. It also means finding the correct address for the opposing party and starting over again. On the other hand, good service means that you can go ahead with the hearing even if the other party does not show up.

Full post as published by Sam Hasler's Indiana Divorce & Family Law Blog on May 24, 2008 (boomark / email).