In Jail for Being In Debt

[frogger]

Amazing how the story changes when the truth is introduced into the mix.

[NHC]

Here's my question on this....

How can a person be jailed for ignoring a summons to court if they didn't receive it???

ie: We've all seen it happen...the process server tapes it to the door and assumes that's a correct service....or they go shove it at a person who clearly is not the person they're looking for just so they can say the service was done....I'm assuming that the burden of proof (that they didn't receive the summons in the first place) also lies with the debtor...which places that person in a catch 22 of sorts....I had one idiot (just before the bankruptcy) stuff the summons in my screen door when no one was home...

I'm not saying the debtor didn't know they owe the money (how many of those collection calls have we ALL ignored??)...sure they know...but how many of these people didn't know about the court date due to an improper service???

[tigergem]

Yeah, once upon a time in a land far far away I got served with a summons for somebody else. It was for a debt, too, come to think of it. Discover, I think. I did "the right thing" and wrote an "answer" to it, stating that I was the person who had received service but I was not the person named on the summons and did not know the identity or location of the named defendant and could not be a lawful proxy for service on that person. At least I thought that was the right thing to do at that time. Unfortunately I was distracted by a shiny object and forgot to go to court to see how that turned out.

[GoingDown]

Yeah, once upon a time in a land far far away I got served with a summons for somebody else. It was for a debt, too, come to think of it. Discover, I think. I did "the right thing" and wrote an "answer" to it, stating that I was the person who had received service but I was not the person named on the summons and did not know the identity or location of the named defendant and could not be a lawful proxy for service on that person. At least I thought that was the right thing to do at that time. Unfortunately I was distracted by a shiny object and forgot to go to court to see how that turned out.

Thanks. This comment made me actually laugh out loud. That was great.

[treehugger1]

Another amazing part of this story is that she listed her assets and bank account number and didn't bother to go close her bank account. The article states that a few weeks after she gave her asset and bank info, funds were seized from her bank account. She should have just given them her debit card and said, "help yourself."

[GoingDown]

Unfortunately, most debtors are ignorant about how to protect themselves and make themselves as judgment proof as possible.

If she had just went and closed her checking account after giving them the info, she could have kept that money in cash at her home and it would have been safe from creditors.

[WhatMoney]

Here's my question on this....
How can a person be jailed for ignoring a summons to court if they didn't receive it???
...
I'm not saying the debtor didn't know they owe the money (how many of those collection calls have we ALL ignored??)...sure they know...but how many of these people didn't know about the court date due to an improper service???

You are confusing PRE-judgment actions with POST judgment actions. You can legally ignore, lie to, and swing and sway around a collector before they obtain a judgment for the debt. You can ignore the initial pre-hearing summons after you are sued, but BEFORE there is any hearing and judgment. You just get a default judgment in that case - which is what 98% of debtors actually do, unless they hurry up and file for BK before the hearing.

You cannot ignore a court order to complete a written or in-person interrogatory asking you under oath to reveal all of your assets, AFTER you have the judgment. This is what these people in the article did. By blowing off the legal process of the court they were cited for contempt and arrested. You will receive at least two summons for the interrogatory, with confirmation of delivery, so the likelihood of faulty service for an interrogation order is very low.

As far as never knowing about the court order - well you would have to be served at least three times to get to the court order. In addition the creditor would make numerous attempts to phone you after the judgment. If a court order arrives via certified return receipt mail requiring only your signature - how do you claim you never received the letter? Do people routinely forge someone else's signature that they do not know, so they can accept a CMRR delivered to the wrong person? Anyone who blows off a lawsuit and ignores all notices can get in trouble. There is no case where the person arrested did not already know they had ignored court orders. Just like that whiny woman in the video, they change their story when talking to the press to get sympathy for their stupidity.

[WhatMoney]

There is an interesting article about using jail as a deterrent for Civil Contempt of court in the link below. Seems it is an old English common law holdover, and many enlightened European countries now outlaw jail for civil contempt.

An excerpt from the article:

Abandoning civil contempt would not be absurd. After all, that specific power derives from British common law. Civil law, which is also known as Continental or Romano-Germanic law, is at least as widespread as common law; for example, it is the basis of French Civil Law and the Swiss Civil Code. The fundamental difference between the two systems is that common law derives rules or precedents from specific cases and civil law starts with rules and applies them to specific cases.

For purposes of this article, however, the fundamental difference is that most civil-law countries do not recognize civil imprisonment for contempt. In their book The Civil Law Tradition: An Introduction to the Legal Systems of Western Europe and Latin America, legal scholars John Merryman and Rogelio Perez-Perdomo wrote, “Another fundamental difference between the civil law and common law traditions occurs in enforcement proceedings. Civil law jurisdictions have nothing comparable to the common law notion of civil contempt of court. . . . [I]n the common law a person can be compelled to act or to refrain from acting by the threat of imprisonment or fine for contempt of court—that is, for refusing to obey a court order addressed to him or her as a person.. . . The civil law, by way of contrast, knows no civil contempt of court and tends to operate solely in rem. This means that regardless of the type of claim one has against another person, the only way one can collect the claim is by obtaining a money judgment.”

Much of the world, including most of western Europe, functions without the common-law tradition of civil imprisonment. Thus it is not clear that eliminating the practice would harm North American jurisprudence in any manner.

Indeed, there are good reasons to believe that eliminating the imprisonment would improve justice in North America.

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2229

[HHM]

There was a recent Supreme Court option (recent as in the last few years) about Civil Contempt. Basically, they said there are limits. Once the coercive effect of jail has been exhausted, the court cannot indefinitely jail someone for civil contempt. At the point where there is an impasse, jail become punitive, which is prohibited.