A district court judge ordered a defendant accused of sexual assault to provide his phone’s PIN number to the Commonwealth.
The defendant failed to provide the correct PIN number and the judge locked him up for civil contempt.
Eventually the defendant sought jail credit for the time he was held in contempt.
The district court judge denied the jail-credit request and the defendant appealed the decision.
Today the Appeals Court issued a slip opinion upholding the lower court’s ruling.
We confront for the first time the question whether defendants who are held in custody prior to sentencing are entitled to jail credit in their criminal cases for the portion of that time when they were detained as a sanction for civil contempt. For the following reasons, we conclude that a defendant is not entitled to jail credit in the criminal case in these circumstances.
The Appeals Court goes on to state,
We conclude that the sanction for civil contempt was a matter that was sufficiently independent of the criminal case on which the defendant was sentenced and that he was not entitled to have that time credited toward his sentence on the criminal case. Importantly, public policy considerations dictate this outcome because holding otherwise would undermine a judge’s inherent contempt power to coerce a contemnor to obey a court order. (Citations omitted.)
The full text of the slip opinion is attached below.