Break the law or go to jail
Can life get any better? I have always said that there are so many gun laws that it is impossible not to be breaking them. So what do you do when the courts demand that you break them or go to jail? One person found out.
An Alton woman embroiled in a divorce case spent more than four hours in jail for contempt of court after she refused a Madison County’s judge’s order to return a handgun to her ex-husband, a convicted felon.
Elizabeth “Beth” Ritchie, 30, said that complying with Associate Judge Ellar Duff’s order, delivered at a hearing on Thursday, would have required Ritchie to commit a crime herself.
It is a felony in Illinois for a felon to possess a firearm, and for anyone to transfer a gun to a felon.
Duff said in an interview Friday that she did not learn until after the hearing that Ritchie’s ex-husband was a felon, and that she then ordered Beth Ritchie released from the Madison County Jail.
Now the judge is not happy being in the spotlight.
“This was a disgruntled person who flat out refused, blatantly and disrespectfully in open court, to comply with a court order,” Duff said.
When asked whether Duff knew that complying with the order would constitute a crime, the judge said she did not know that Tim Ritchie was a convicted felon.
“That did not come out in open court. If they said it did, they are liars,” Duff said.
When asked whether a court reporter had been present at the hearing, so that a transcript could determine whether Ritchie and her father were, indeed, liars, Duff said, “I never said they were liars. You’re twisting my words.”
Judicial crow. It’s what’s for Dinner.
August 3rd, 2005 at 12:56 pm
Well, let’s see. It was a bench trial, as all divorce cases are, so the judge held all the powers traditionally held by juries in other contexts. Maybe we should think of this as the bench equivalent of a “jury nullification” of the law banning felons from possessing firearms?
August 5th, 2005 at 4:42 pm
Divorce court gets the worst judges.