A Pitkin County judge issued a faulty contempt order that revoked a mother’s parenting time for three summers without addressing the required factors, Colorado’s second-highest court ruled earlier this month.

After Vanessa Kirianoff-Brown did not transfer custody of her child to her ex-husband over two holiday weekends, he moved to hold her in contempt of court. District Court Judge Christopher G. Seldin held a hearing in July 2022 and concluded Kirianoff-Brown disobeyed the family’s parenting plan. He held her in contempt.

“To remediate the contempt, the Court strips Mother of her summer vacation time,” Seldin wrote, “for this year and the next two years. These two-week periods during 2022, 2023 and 2024 shall become Father’s parenting time.”

After Kirianoff-Brown appealed the contempt order, a three-judge panel for the Court of Appeals agreed the ruling was defective for multiple reasons.

Although judges may hold people in “punitive contempt” when their actions are offensive to the “authority and dignity of the court,” Seldin held Kirianoff-Brown in “remedial contempt.” In contrast to the fines and imprisonment that flow from punitive contempt, remedial contempt is designed to force someone to comply with a court order.

In issuing a remedial contempt order, judges need to conclude the litigant has the ability to perform whatever actions are necessary to comply. 

Not only did Seldin’s order contain no such finding, wrote Judge Stephanie Dunn in the appellate panel’s Feb. 1 opinion, but it did not describe how Kirianoff-Brown could correct her past violation.

“The conduct giving rise to the contempt finding was mother’s failure to bring the child to Colorado on two separate occasions in early 2022. Mother could not go back in time and bring the child to Colorado for father’s supervised parenting time,” Dunn wrote. “Put simply, her violations of the parenting plan could not be purged, so remedial sanctions were not available.”

Even if Seldin had instead ordered extra parenting time for Kirianoff-Brown’s ex-husband to make up for his missed visitations, Dunn added, it needed to happen by early 2023 and would not have affected Kirianoff-Brown’s summer custody.

The panel overturned the contempt order.

The case is In the Marriage of Keep.