Lawyer Jailed For Contempt Is Freed After 14 Years

H. Beatty Chadwick has been in a staring match with the judicial system for the past 14 years, and the system just blinked. Chadwick was ordered to pay his ex-wife $2.5 million after their divorce. He refused to pay saying that he couldn't because he lost the money in a series of "bad investments." The judge in the case didn't believe him and sent him to jail for contempt. That was 14 years ago. Last week another judge let Chadwick go saying that "continued imprisonment would be legal only if there was some likelihood that ultimately he would comply with the order; otherwise, the confinement would be merely punitive instead of coercive." Chadwick, now 73, is believed to have served the longest contempt sentence in US history.

Comments

Re:Why is this slashdot worthy?

[anomnomnomymous]

Mmm, hard choice: Choose to use my modpoints to mod you down (or the GP up), or reply: Let's go for reply.

The GP is not saying that he can't see how it would not affect him: He's saying he wonders why it's on Slashdot: I, for one, agree.

Whereas there have been other stories in Idle which are rubbish, most of the times they at least have -some- relevance to Slashdot (eg. tech-related). This has none whatsoever.
This doesn't mean it's not news at all, since it is: Just not Slashdot news imho.

Stuff like this (and the whole Idle section) makes Slashdot more and more like Digg, where each bullshitty story gets frontpaged if only enough people choose to digg it.
The shame here is that an actual editor selected it to be displayed on the front page: Once again, not something that's supposed to be there.

Now cue the 'You can filter out Idle or choose not to read the article'-comment, but the only reason why I read this article was because I was curious what relevance it had to technology.