Legal News

Man Jailed On Civil Contempt Charges Freed After 14 Years

By Amir Efrati

Forgive us for being a little late with this post, but we couldn’t pass it up.

H. Beatty Chadwick, a former Philadelphia-area lawyer, who has been behind bars for nearly 14 years without being charged, was let go on Friday. (HT: ABA Journal) If the name sounds familiar, that’s because our own Ashby Jones wrote about Chadwick earlier this year as part of an article on the murky world of civil contempt.

In some states, judges face few restrictions on how long someone can be held in civil contempt, which is aimed to force behavior such as making a witness testify, compelling a journalist to reveal sources or strong-arming a parent into paying child support. Numerous individuals have spent years in jail without ever being charged with a crime.

In Chadwick’s case, in 1994 a Delaware County judge held him in contempt for failing to put $2.5 million in a court-controlled account. Chadwick says he lost the money in bad investments; his wife’s attorney claimed he had hidden it offshore. In 1995, Mr. Chadwick was arrested and detained.

After multiple efforts by Chadwick, now 73 years old, Judge Joseph Cronin of Delaware County determined that his continued incarceration had lost its coercive effect and would not result in his turning over the money. It is believed to be the longest imprisonment on a civil contempt charge in U.S. history.

“He’s not bitter, he’s happy to be out,” Chadwick’s attorney, Michael Malloy, told the Philly Daily News.

While we’re on the subject of contempt, a California patent lawyer may face two days in jail for criminal contempt of court because he allegedly tried to prejudice a jury in a patent case. Here’s the story from the Recorder.

During jury selection in federal court in Texas’s eastern district, lawyer John van Loben Sels, repping Beyond Innovation Technology Co., asked potential jurors on July 6 if they had “a problem with a company that puts its headquarters offshore on a Caribbean island in order to avoid paying U.S. taxes.” He was referring to his adversary in the case, O2 Micro.

The judge had a problem with the question because he had prohibited Beyond Innovation’s lawyers from saying anything about O2 Micro’s tax haven home in the Cayman Islands, as it had nothing to do with the patent case.

Van Loben Sels, according to the Recorder, hasn’t served his time yet because the judge said that if he behaves the rest of the way, the sentence could be dropped. The judge also granted a motion for a mistrial by O2 Micro, repped by Howrey, and hit Beyond Innovation and its lawyers with sanctions.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 14, 2009 (boomark / email).