A Lebanon County Court of Common Pleas judge has attempted to strike a balance between finding a delinquent father in contempt for willfully violating a child support order and being lenient because the payments exceeded the father’s earnings.
In an opinion regarding a contempt order in Coffey v. Behl issued March 17, Judge Bradford H. Charles sent defendant Christopher D. Behl, a father of two, to jail for 30 days and remanded the case back to the domestic relations master with the instruction to “transcend” an analysis of the payment recommendation based on the higher earning capacity of the father’s previous job.
