Legal News

No Charge: A Closer Look at Civil-Contempt Confinement

By Ashby Jones

Remember Martin Armstrong (pictured)? He’s the New York financier who spent over six years behind bars on civil contempt charges for failure to produce documents and about $15 million in gold and antiquities. Then there’s Beatty Chadwick, a former Philadelphia-area lawyer who’s been in jail for nearly 14 years on civil contempt charges, without being charged with a crime. And Manuel Osete, a businessman who spent nearly three years in an Arizona jail — without facing criminal charges.

It doesn’t happen often, but these cases illustrate the possibility — thanks to civil contempt — of spending a long time in jail without ever being charged with a crime. Civil contempt is a murky legal concept that some scholars think needs an overhaul. Click here for today’s WSJ story.

The theory behind “contempt” is fairly simple: A judge generally can issue either a civil or criminal contempt charge whenever he or she feels that a party has disobeyed an order or has disrupted a proceeding.

In a criminal contempt charge, which is aimed at punishing bad behavior, a defendant is afforded the due-process safeguards of the criminal system, including a possible jury trial. Civil contempt charges, on the other hand, are meant to be coercive, issued to force behavior. Because civil “contemnors” hold the key to their own freedom — after all, complying will spring them — they aren’t given the same due-process rights as criminal defendants.

But problems arise when a court doesn’t believe the person. With the party and judge at loggerheads over, say, the availability of funds, it is often the contemnor who loses, forced to remain behind bars at the mercy of a skeptical judge.

Critics question why the burden rests with contemnors. For instance, why must they prove they don’t have the money, rather than the burden being on the prosecutor to prove they do? “It runs counter to our entire system to say ‘It’s your burden to prove a negative,’” says Jayne Ressler, a professor at Brooklyn Law School.

Some states have passed limits on the length of time a contemnor can be held. But critics say that in too many, judges still have too much discretion. Says Ressler: “These results of too many civil-contempt confinements are flatly outrageous and often unconstitutional.”

Photo: Bloomberg/Landov

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 08, 2009 (boomark / email).