General legal information furnished as a service of Fort Lauderdale / West Palm Beach family law attorney Janet Langjahr
Not surprisingly, many parents who allegedly default in their child support obligations don’t have the money to hire a lawyer to defend them at enforcement and / or civil contempt proceedings.
So, like it or not, they often defend themselves at these hearings on a pro se basis, a lawyer’s term for representing yourself.
According to a New Jersey Star Ledger article, when the circumstances are severe enough to warrant criminal contempt proceedings, the allegedly delinquent parent should get a bonus: free legal representation from a court-appointed attorney.
Ironically, this reported holding may have an unintended and counter-intuitive impact: custodial parents may now favor the civil remedy and non-custodial parents may now actually favor the criminal remedy.
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