For those of you wanting to be jailed briefly for contempt, this item offers some pretty good tips that you might want to jot down:
- You will be instructed to turn off all cell phones while in the courtroom. Ignore this.
- Sit as close to the bench as possible. If you can’t sit at the counsel’s table, sit in the front row.
- Set ringtone to some sort of rap song.
- If your phone rings, go ahead and answer it and carry on a conversation.
- When the judge becomes visibly angry and says “how dare you answer a phone in court,” respond with “Oops, my bad.”
- Bonus points if you are in court to face multiple burglary charges.
This got a 17-year-old Australian sent to jail for the rest of the day after he answered his phone in a magistrate’s court in Darwin. That “is a serious contempt,” shouted the irritated magistrate at the boy. He probably still would have avoided jail at that point, but “[w]hen the teen waved it off as ‘my bad,’ [the magistrate] ordered he be taken away.”
The boy ended up spending about three hours in a holding cell before he finally agreed to come back and apologize.
Link: News.com (Australia)