PANAMA CITY — The 1st District Court of Appeal (DCA) has denied a motion to appoint a new judge in the criminal contempt of court case against a local attorney.
Judge James Fensom charged Bill Price with criminal contempt during a February trial after Price allegedly violated Fensom’s pretrial order limiting the way Price could talk to or about a transgendered witness for the prosecution. Price and his attorney have each appealed to Fensom to disqualify himself and allow a judge with no connection to the alleged contempt to hear the case.
Fensom twice ruled he would hear the case, which Walter Smith, the attorney representing Price, said raises questions about whether his client can get a fair trial in front of the judge who was also the victim of the alleged crime. When Fensom denied the second request to allow another judge to hear the case during a brief hearing Friday, Smith filed an emergency petition with the 1st DCA.
The court provided little insight into how it reached the decision in an opinion filed Monday. The opinion said only the petition was denied on its merits.
Fensom “denied it and the 1st DCA denied it, so we have to proceed with the assumption that we’ll get a fair trial,” Smith said.
Price has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled for a trial on the misdemeanor charge Thursday. If he’s convicted, he could be sentenced to up to six months in jail. He also could be exposed to sanctions from the Florida Bar. He is not entitled to a jury trial.
Smith has handled contempt charges in the past when he was with the Public Defender’s Office, but those were primarily cases in which a party in a divorce wasn’t following rules for alimony or child custody, he said.
“I’ve never been in exactly this situation before,” he said. “I just hope I don’t end up charged with contempt.”
There are issues to be resolved, Smith said. For instance, Fensom didn’t reduce his pretrial order to writing until after the jury reached a verdict, and Smith said Price doesn’t recall exactly when the order was made clear to him, if it was.
Smith said he expected Assistant State Attorney Bob Sombathy, who was the prosecutor in the case that led to the contempt charge against Price, to be called to testify as a witness, and his client will testify, too. Smith said he might call Fensom to testify as a witness, and though he said he doesn’t expect that to actually happen these cases are so rare there’s a lot of confusion about the procedure.
“The rules aren’t really well understood,” Smith said.