Defending Contempt | Hattiesburg Divorce Lawyer

I’ve previously written on the importance of acting immediately if you need a modification of child support or alimony. This is because once a payment is due, it has vested. A court cannot relieve you of the responsibility of making a payment once that payment is due. (For the sake of convenience, I’m going to refer to child support and alimony collectively as “support.”)

Once you have missed a payment, you are in contempt of court. You then have the uphill battle of defending that contempt charge The problem is 99.9% of the support-paying population doesn’t know this, and they usually wait until after they’ve missed a payment before seeking a modification.

Fortunately, impossibility to comply with a court order is a defense to contempt. For example, if you have lost your business, your job, and your home, it is probably impossible for you to pay support also. Most courts are not going to just take your word for it, though.

From what I have seen recently, in my own experience, courts are setting the bar quite high for modifying support payments downward. While they admit impossibility is a defense, proving it is impossible to the court requires quite a bit of persuasion. They want to see some good faith action on the part of the person seeking the modification. And when they say “good faith” they mean a lot more than relying just on faith alone.

Let me give you some examples bases on two modifications I’ve attempted to get approved by courts. In both of these cases, the support payer lost their job. They applied for several jobs; one even had proof of over 150 applications he had made. In both cases, the judge (a separate judge in each case) found that the person seeking modification was not making a good faith effort.

Both of these judges indicated that the payer needed to show they were looking for, and would accept, any job. Both of these individuals had college degrees, and the court thought they need to be looking for any work, even if it was as a day laborer swinging a hammer. They needed to show that they were taking active steps to make good, and weren’t relying just on faith.