Opinion ID: 782524
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Civil Contempt Order

Text: 39 On January 7, 2002, the district court entered an order holding Cassens in civil contempt of the court's prior order of July 24, 2001. Specifically, it found that Cassens failed to timely reinstate Garrison to his job and to his rightful place on the Cassens seniority list and failed to make certain pension payments as ordered by the court. Because Garrison had already been reinstated by Cassens at the time the court issued its ruling, as compensatory damages for contempt, Cassens was ordered to pay lost wages to Garrison in the amount of $15, 367.75, and to assign Garrison a company seniority date of June 10, 1996, on its roster and all records. Cassens was also ordered to pay Garrison retroactive pension contributions beginning from June 10, 1996. Because we find no basis for liability under § 301, we necessarily reverse and vacate the district court's civil contempt order in its entirety. 40 Broadly, the purpose of civil contempt is to coerce an individual to perform an act or to compensate an injured complainant. United States v. Bayshore Assocs., Inc., 934 F.2d 1391, 1400 (6th Cir.1991). The purpose of a criminal contempt order, however, is punitive; it is to vindicate the authority of the court. Gompers v. Bucks Stove & Range Co., 221 U.S. 418, 441, 31 S.Ct. 492, 55 L.Ed. 797 (1911). The general rule is that whether a contempt judgment survives the avoidance of an underlying order depends on the nature of the contempt decree. If the contempt is criminal it stands; if it is civil it falls. Latrobe Steel Co. v. United Steelworkers, 545 F.2d 1336, 1342 (3d Cir.1976) (citation omitted). As the Supreme Court has long held 41 It does not follow, of course, that simply because a defendant may be punished for criminal contempt for disobedience of an order later set aside on appeal, that the plaintiff in the action may profit by way of a fine imposed in a simultaneous proceeding for civil contempt based upon a violation of the same order. The right to remedial relief falls with an injunction which events prove was erroneously issued .... 42 United States v. United Mine Workers, 330 U.S. 258, 294-95, 67 S.Ct. 677, 91 L.Ed. 884 (1947) (emphasis added). In a similar vein, we have also explained that 43 A conviction for criminal contempt may indeed survive the reversal of the decree disobeyed; the punishment is to vindicate the court's authority which has been equally flouted whether or not the command was right. But the same cannot be true of civil contempts, which are only remedial. It is true that the reversal of the decree does not retroactively obliterate the past existence of the violation; yet on the other hand it does more than destroy the future sanction of the decree. It adjudges that it never should have passed; that the right which it affected to create was no right at all. To let the liability stand for past contumacy would be to give the plaintiff a remedy not for a right but for a wrong which the law should not do. 44