Johnson v. Johnson

The question posed by this appeal is whether, under the circumstances of this case, a father, charged with the support of his children, should have been imprisoned until he purged himself of contempt for failure to pay in full the arrearages that had accumulated over a period of several years.

When the father was divorced from the mother of their three children on October 19, 1961, he was ordered to pay the mother fifty dollars a week for the support of the children. Although he complied with the order for about twenty months, he thereafter began decreasing the weekly payments until he was…