Opinion ID: 2359432
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Adams v. Wells

Text: The Committee challenges Judge Benoit's action in jailing Scott and Bonny Wells on March 3, 1983. [16] At a disclosure proceeding on July 15, 1982, in District Court (Farmington), the Wellses and their judgment creditor, Sherman Adams, entered into an installment payment agreement providing for weekly payments to Adams. Judge Benoit approved the settlement agreement, entitled Consent to Installment Payment Order, and filed it with the court records. When the Wellses stopped making the required payments after about five weeks, Adams filed a motion for contempt. Acting on that motion, Judge Benoit on December 16 found the Wellses in contempt of the settlement order and sentenced them to 10 days' imprisonment, based upon his belief that the Wellses had been able to make the payments to Adams but had failed to accord those payments proper priority. Upon the Wellses' representation that they would be able to pay off the entire debt in two months, Judge Benoit postponed the jail sentence until February 24, when the Wellses would be imprisoned if they had not by then paid the whole debt. The total amount of the debt was over $1,000; the aggregate amount overdue under the agreement on December 16 was less than $200. On February 24 the Wellses appeared and the matter was continued until March 3. When March 3 arrived, the Wellses had not paid the debt, so Judge Benoit sent them to jail, based solely on their failure to pay the full sum, and without providing a hearing as to their then ability to pay the entire debt. In Wells v. State, 474 A.2d 846 (Me. 1984), the Law Court reviewed on appeal the Wellses' petition for habeas corpus and concluded, based on the lack of a hearing on March 3 on their current ability to pay the debt, that Judge Benoit imprisoned them illegally. As clear as it was to the Law Court in that case that a hearing was required at the time of imprisonment, tensions between statutory provisions and the Law Court's earlier opinions may well have produced confusion as to the remedies that were available to a judgment creditor. [17] In that circumstance, we conclude that a reasonably prudent and competent judge would not have felt that incarcerating the Wellses on March 3 was obviously wrong. Judge Benoit's action was judicial error, but it was not judicial misconduct.