A Gillette-based state judge didn’t take the proper steps when holding a tardy public defense attorney in contempt, the Wyoming Supreme Court ruled Tuesday.
Though the case hinged upon technical interplay of legal concepts, the high court’s majority opinion skirts a much more tender underlying issue: the ongoing public defender shortage in the northeast corner of Wyoming.
Christopher Goetz was a public defender in the region who quit his job last autumn after District Court Judge Matthew F.G. Castano fined him $100 and ordered him to write an apology letter to a county prosecutor.
Goetz was 45 minutes late to court following what he characterized as a scheduling mix-up. He paid the fine and wrote the apology letter.
He also quit his job after the incident, exacerbating a public defender shortage in that corner of the state that worsened to the point of judges pulling private attorneys into the cases of some indigent defendants.
Meanwhile, Goetz appealed the punishment to the Wyoming Supreme Court, saying Castano’s action was invalid because the judge failed to create a standalone criminal contempt case to penalize him.
Representing Castano, the Wyoming Attorney General’s office countered, saying the judge’s later order pronouncing a sanction on Goetz was valid.
Neither act was valid, a majority of the Wyoming Supreme Court’s justices ruled Tuesday.
The penalties Castano assessed against Goetz, and Goetz’s tardiness, together made the contempt case a case of “indirect criminal contempt.”
That means the court sought to punish Goetz for defying its processes outside the judge’s presence.
To pursue such a penalty, Castano should have created a standalone criminal case rather than punishing Goetz as part of the criminal case of the defendant Goetz was representing, the Wyoming Supreme Court majority wrote.
The justices reversed, or undid, Goetz’s contempt penalty.
Castano declined Tuesday to comment.
Judges Changing Their Minds
Justice John Fenn agreed with the majority’s end result, but disagreed with its underpinning reasoning, he wrote in a separate opinion.
After pronouncing Goetz in contempt verbally during a court hearing, Castano filed a written order invoking a different legal mechanism: holding Goetz under a sanction, or misconduct penalty.
Contempt orders require a corresponding written order, and so the oral contempt order’s lack of a matching order disqualifies it from being the lynchpin in this debate, wrote Fenn.
Rather, the high court should have focused on the written order for sanction.
That order was likewise invalid, concluded Fenn — not because it didn’t match the spoken order, but because Castano didn’t give Goetz notice that he was going to be sanctioned.
The majority cast Castano’s switch from a spoken contempt order to a written sanction order as an effort to repackage the misplaced contempt penalty.
But Fenn cast the differing orders as a simple change of mind.
“We have recognized (that) ‘until a final order is entered, a court is free to change its mind,’” wrote Fenn, citing a 2009 Wyoming Supreme Court case.
And the final, written order should have been the subject of the appeal, since appeals spring from final, appealable orders, he added.
About Apology Letters
There's no undoing the apology letter that Goetz wrote to the prosecutor, so that part of the argument is moot, the majority ruled.
During the original appeal, Goetz's attorney H. Michael Bennett requested the remedy, tongue-in-cheek, of having Castano, in turn, write an apology letter to the public defender's office.
The Supreme Court's order doesn't address that request.
Bennett said he was pleased with the majority opinion.
"It's great for my client obviously, but I thought it was a very good opinion, to finally get the law settled," said Bennett. "That being late for court if anything is indirect criminal contempt."
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
