Page:Arkansas Department of Human Services v. Dowdy.pdf/14

 the court below believed the contrary). No one disputes that Lisa Jenson, DHS's planned witness for the initial hearing, was present and prepared to testify about DHS's ultimate recommendation in the case. It is further undisputed that when asked about Eneks's absence in the initial hearing, Mr. Huffman admitted that he had arranged for Eneks to leave. Stripped to the objective facts available at the end of the initial hearing, then, the circuit court was left with the bare observations that Huffman and Eneks conspired to do something they were allowed to do and then Huffman had the audacity to tell the truth about it. It was on this basis that the circuit court notified Huffman that he and Eneks would be subject to a later contempt hearing. Notably, even at this initial hearing, the circuit court had apparently already decided that "collusive" conduct indicative of "some sort of deceit" had occurred and that it was "obvious that what [Huffman] did was improper."

At the contempt hearing, the circuit court introduced into evidence security-camera footage that did nothing more than corroborate that Huffman had dismissed Eneks from the courtroom for a hearing in which she was not slated to testify. This is, of course, the action to which Huffman had already admitted. The closest any of the testimony at the contempt hearing came to confirming the circuit court's suspicion of ill intent was Jenson's affirmative response to the circuit court's question about whether Eneks "might have had a different opinion" than the agency's ultimate recommendation at some stage in the case. Even this equivocal support was undercut by Eneks's own unequivocal testimony that she had "not recommended anything that contradicted the opinion of the Department in this case."

I am mindful of the fact that circuit courts are better positioned than this court to assess the litigants and facts before them; that is why this court’s standards of review on most discretionary issues—applying the rules of contempt among them—are quite deferential. If