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contempt of court

 CONTEMPT OF COURT


Contempt of court is defined as disrespect or disobedience toward a court or interference with its

orderly process.

Title 18 of the United States Code defines contempt of court as having three essential elements:


 Misbehavior by anyone in its presence or close enough to obstruct the administration of

justice;

 Misconduct by any of its officers in official transactions;

 Disobedience to its lawful writ, process, order, rule, decree, or command.

Contempt of court is divided into two categories: criminal and civil, and direct and indirect.

Because criminal contempt is a crime in and of itself, such contempt charges are punitive

(fines or imprisonment) and distinct from the underlying case being heard. Civil contempt

charges are intended to compel future compliance with a court order and can be avoided by

obeying the court.

Direct contempt occurs when the court is present, whereas indirect contempt occurs when the

court is not present. Judges have broad discretion in determining who and what constitutes

contempt of court.Contempt of court can be defined as any act of disrespect, disobedience,

defiance, or interference by any of the parties involved in a legal proceeding, from witnesses

and defendants to jurors and lawyers.

EXAMPLE OF CONTEMPT OF COURT

Martin A. Armstrong's case is a well-known example of civil contempt of court. The US

government accused Armstrong, a former financial advisor who founded Princeton

Economics International, of a $3 billion Ponzi scheme in a civil securities fraud suit.

A federal judge ordered him to turn over $15 million in gold bars, rare coins, and antiquities

to the government in January 2000. Armstrong claimed he did not have the assets, and his

repeated failure to produce them resulted in a seven-year prison sentence for various criminal

acts, as well as fines for contempt of court charges.


Armstrong was sentenced to five years in prison in April 2007 after pleading guilty to one

count of conspiracy to conceal trading losses totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. In

March 2011, he was released from prison.

SPECIAL CONSIDERATION

The use of online tools and social media has resulted in new challenges for the justice

system. To ensure juror impartiality and avoid the possibility of a mistrial, courts have

always instructed jurors to refrain from seeking information about cases other than evidence

presented at trial, as well as to refrain from communicating about a case before a verdict is

reached.

Jurors have previously been imprisoned for contempt of court for using the internet while

serving on the jury. In 2011, a juror in the United Kingdom was sentenced to eight months in

prison for internet-related contempt of court after exchanging messages with a defendant on

Facebook (now Meta), causing a multi-million-pound trial to collapse.

Two years later, in 2013, two jurors in the United Kingdom were jailed for two months on

contempt of court charges after one of them made comments about the defendant on

Facebook and the other conducted online research on the case in which he was a juror.

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