This will be the 14th Christmas behind bars on contempt charges for H. Beatty Chadwick, who allegedly hid $2.5 million from his wife in divorce proceedings:
After a hearing yesterday, Delaware County Court President Judge Joseph P. Cronin Jr. turned down Chadwick’s latest request for Christmas furlough, declaring him “a significant risk of flight.”
Had the court let him out for Christmas, Chadwick could have cut off his electronic-monitoring bracelet and used his money and contacts to fly off in a helicopter, his ex-wife’s attorney, Albert Momjian, said.
“He is a devious person,” Momjian contended.
Chadwick’s lawyer, Michael J. Malloy, who said he had worked for Chadwick free of charge for the last few years, said the idea of a helicopter’s waiting to whisk his client off was ludicrous.
“At this point, everything about this case is irrational,” Malloy said in an interview.
Overlawyered says that point was passed many years ago:
Chadwick has spent more time locked up for his contempt than any American in history. While I don’t sympathize with Chadwick (who now suffers cancer) if he’s really hiding the money from the court and his ex, surely at some point his indefinite detention becomes a due process violation. Unlike most who serves life sentences, Chadwick has never been adjudicated a criminal, and debtors’ prisons were abolished centuries ago.
Then there’s the story of James S. Anderson. An innocent man, he’s spending his fifth consecutive prison in jail. Because it snowed:
A state appeals court erased the 31-year-old’s conviction for armed robbery this month, saying new evidence uncovered by a law school student corroborates what Anderson has always said: He was another state when a group of men hit a Tacoma grocery store in 2004.
Prosecutors joined Anderson’s lawyers in asking for his immediate release, but severe winter storms closed the court and helped delay the necessary paperwork.