Fourteen Years and Counting

Commercial lawyers sometimes say that we've abolished debtor's prison every place but family court. Here's a guy who knows (link):

Consider Mr. Chadwick's case. In 1994, during divorce proceedings, a Delaware County judge held Mr. Chadwick in civil contempt for failing to put $2.5 million in a court-controlled account. He says he lost the money in bad investments; his wife's attorney claimed he had hidden it offshore. In April 1995, Mr. Chadwick was arrested and detained. Nearly 14 years later, Mr. Chadwick, who suffers from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, is still in jail -- even after a retired judge was hired to help locate the money, and failed.

"The money is gone," says Mr. Chadwick's lawyer, Michael Malloy. "The coercive effect of this order is gone; it has turned into a life sentence." The judge who held Mr. Chadwick in contempt in 1994 couldn't be reached for comment, but he has said publicly that he doesn't believe Mr. Chadwick lacks the funds.

Aside from the family law wrinkle, there's a problem here of general interest in the law. That's the matter of so-called "civil contempt," where, as the saying goes, "the responding party has the keys to the jail in his own pocket! A lot of people have noticed that there's a problem in subsuming real rights under the tedious framework of court management. HT Boingboing; have not yet seen the original WSJ story.