@Barack Obama:
I think you have a very mis-informed idea of how the world should work. There are places in our society where the individual simply does not have the right to act like a jerk. For various really good reasons, we allow Judges, Officers of the Law, Captains of ships and airplanes, and the like to have very strong authority over their domain. If the captain of an aircraft tells you to sit down and shut up, you had best do it; failure to do so can get you arrested and dragged off the plane, for example.
Courtrooms are “crucibles” in more than one way (this alludes to an idiom about the function of a court). People who appear in court are often not at their best. They are unhappy, because a courtroom is a place where conflict is resolved, and it isn’t always an easy process. They are upset, because they often face significant consequences should things not go their way. They are stressed, because they lack power or control over the situation (having had to yield that power to attorneys and judges). Left unchecked, bad behavior in a courtroom would render the ability to proceed impossible.
I have been in two different professions with authoritarian workplaces: attorney and teacher. As a teacher, I often wished for the decorum of the courtroom. However, the modern teacher has been instructed to be tolerant and gentle-handed when it comes to dealing with recalcitrant students, because that way we don’t have to punish them as often for their unwillingness to cede authority to adults, resulting in a higher success rate for completion of the process. But we cannot treat the courtroom the same way. And even I, as a teacher, had the power to hold a student in “contempt” of my classroom; that’s what detention and phone calls home and referrals for administrative discipline are. And I can assure you that my tolerance for “bad” behavior went down significantly when the classroom was filled with a greater percentage of students who felt it was necessary to challenge authority. Otherwise, the result was chaos as other students began to pile on to the growing brouhaha. And I was, as my students will tell you, a pretty laid back teacher.
In the video, the defendant is asked for his plea. He starts with a series of questions not relevant to the question, but the judge is willing to answer them at first. But when it becomes clear that he is not truly asking for information, but rather attempting to make an irrelevant point, he refuses her request to answer her question, and then questions her authority. Whereupon he is found to have committed direct contempt and is given some time in a holding cell to re-think his approach.
One of the reasons that direct contempt has a very low threshold of due process for being applied is that the person in contempt is considered to have the keys to his cell. All he has to do to get out of confinement is do what the judge requests he do. Needless to say, it is the continued intransigence of this person that gets him in trouble.
I know that for a subset of our society, the idea that you have to acquiesce to authority is anathema. But that’s how society works. When the police officer tells you to stand still, and not do a certain thing, you stand still and you don’t do that thing, no matter how wrong you think the officer is. He may BE wrong, but that can usually be sorted out later. Similarly, when a judge asks you a question, you answer the question, or expect that there will be consequences. You certainly don’t take the judge to task.