Barry was recently involved in a difficult child custody and access matter, where he represented a young woman (Ms. B.) who had acted on her own behalf in a protracted and acrimonious trial and who, at the end of the five day trial, found herself arrested for contempt of Court, for having been found to have violated the Court's access orders on forty-one occasions. The young mother of two small children was immediately hand-cuffed and whisked away to the Metro West Detention Centre in Toronto, where she was to serve out her sixty-day sentence. Barry and his co-counsel were retained six days after the mother was detained. They immediately set about preparing the necessary materials to appeal the decision and to obtain an order staying enforcement of the Judgment until the hearing of the appeal, thereby securing her release from custody. They were successful in obtaining the order staying enforcement of the Judgment, and the young mother was released from custody after serving nine days in detention. Had they not succeeded in having the enforcement of the Judgment stayed, their client would have remained in custody, and would have served out her full term, before the appeal would have been heard, making the appeal moot at that point. Fortunately, they were successful but, in the meantime, their young client served nine days in custody in a most nasty facility. To make matters worse, the circumstances of her arrest gave no opportunity to Ms. B. to make appropriate child care arrangements for her two young children, a daughter not quite five, who is the child of the Applicant in this case, and an eighteen month old son, who is the child of a subsequent marriage. Compounding her frustration, Ms. B. was denied the opportunity of seeing her children for the nine days (imagine how traumatizing it must have been for the children) and missed her daughter's fifth birthday, while she was in custody. The appeal of the contempt order and the committal to detention for sixty days, was ultimately heard nearly four months after the original Judgment and, while the finding of contempt was upheld and the committal was found to be necessary and appropriate in the circumstances, the length of the committal was reduced from sixty days to time served, being nine days. The bottom line for Ms. B. was that she would not have to go back to jail. However, the question now for custodial parents is, has the bar been raised (or lowered as the case may be) for a finding of contempt and for the length of a committal? In previous cases, throughout Canada, findings of contempt against custodial parents (usually the mother) have rarely been made. A committal order has been even more rarely used, and never has such a lengthy term been imposed on a first offender. Even the reduced sentence of nine days time-served sets a new high water mark. THE MORAL OF THE STORY The mother, in this case, made two assumptions that proved to be ill-advised. Firstly, on each of the occasions when she was found to have been in breach of the court order(s), she felt that there was a reasonable excuse or explanation for her not giving access. On a number of occasions the child was ill (on a few she was even hospitalized with asthma) and on others there was a verbal agreement between the mother and the child's father where visits were substituted and/or make-up visits were provided. On other occasions, the child simply refused to go to her father's and the mother would not force her to go if she did not want to. Unfortunately, the mother had little or no corroboration (except for the occasions when the child was hospitalized) and had no agreements in writing respecting the substituted or make-up visits. The mother's next major miscalculation was believing that she could represent herself during the lengthy and very acrimonious trial. Unfortunately for her, she was totally out-gunned; the child's father is a very articulate and eloquent speaker, who was able to confidently put his case before the Court and keep emotion out of the equation. On the other hand, the mother got flustered, confused and emotional and, as a result, the playing field was tilted heavily in the father's favour. Not until the last day of a five day trial did the mother retain counsel and, unfortunately, by then it was a case of too little too late. The moral of the story in this case is two-fold. Firstly, just as the old axiom goes, "a lawyer who acts for himself has a fool for a client", so too a litigant in a contested matrimonial matter would be well advised to retain counsel and not attempt to advocate on his or her own behalf. In this case, had the parties retained counsel, it is likely that the trial would have lasted no more than two to three days and, definitely, much less than the five days that were taken by the parties acting on their own behalf. The second, and more important lesson we learn from this case is that, in any matter, and it is not limited to just matrimonial cases, when you are involved in a dispute, have everything documented and corroborated and, where there are private agreements or arrangements between the parties, have them documened in writing and, where possible, have the other party sign, indicating their agreement. For more information on this case, D. v. B. (1998), unreported, Ontario Court, Provincial Division, appealed to Ontario Court, General Division, contact or send your comments to Mr. Goldman by telephone, facsimile or e-mail.