When Can a Spouse be Sanctioned in a Divorce

Most people going through a divorce in Alabama never get sanctioned by the court, and they never come close. Sanctions are not a routine part of a case. They are what happens when someone crosses a line the court has drawn, and keeps crossing it. But the line is real, and the people who end up on the wrong side of it usually got there because they thought the rules did not apply to them. They skipped a deposition. They hid a bank account. They filed a motion just to run up the other side’s legal bill. They looked a judge in the eye and lied.

So the short answer to when a spouse can be sanctioned in a divorce is this: when they refuse to follow the rules of the process, disobey a direct order of the court, or abuse the litigation itself to hurt the other side. Alabama gives its circuit court judges broad power to punish that conduct, and the penalties run from a few hundred dollars in attorney’s fees all the way to jail. This article walks through the specific situations where sanctions come up, the Alabama rules and statutes behind them, and what you can do to stay clear of trouble in your own case.

What “Sanctions” Actually Mean in an Alabama Divorce

A sanction is a penalty a court imposes for misconduct in a case. It is not the same thing as losing an argument. You do not get sanctioned because the judge disagreed with your position on alimony or gave your spouse more of the retirement account. You get sanctioned because of how you behaved inside the process: what you refused to produce, what order you ignored, what you filed in bad faith, or what you swore to that was not true.

Alabama divorces are filed in circuit court and governed by the Alabama Rules of Civil Procedure, the same rules that govern other civil litigation. Several of those rules carry their own built-in penalties. Layered on top of them are the court’s inherent contempt power, criminal statutes that apply when someone lies under oath, and specific fee-shifting statutes that let a judge make one spouse pay the other’s costs. A judge can reach for any of these tools depending on what happened.

The penalties fall into a few broad buckets. The court can order you to pay money, usually the other side’s reasonable expenses and attorney’s fees caused by your conduct. It can strike your pleadings, bar you from introducing certain evidence, or resolve a disputed issue against you as a matter of course. It can hold you in contempt and, in the worst cases, jail you until you comply. And when the lie is serious enough, a separate criminal prosecution for perjury becomes possible. Contested matters are where almost all of this happens, which is one reason a genuinely litigated contested divorce in Alabama demands careful, honest handling from the start.

Discovery Sanctions: The Most Common Way to Get in Trouble

Discovery is the formal exchange of information before trial. Each side gets to ask the other for documents, answers to written questions, and sworn testimony at a deposition. It is where the facts of the case come out: income, accounts, debts, property, and the conduct of the parties. Discovery is also where most sanctions in a divorce originate, because the rules require cooperation and some people simply will not cooperate.

Rule 37 of the Alabama Rules of Civil Procedure is the engine here. It authorizes the court to sanction a party who fails to make discovery. That includes failing to attend your own deposition after being served with proper notice, failing to answer interrogatories, and failing to respond to a request for production of documents. It also covers refusing to obey a discovery order the court has already entered.

When a party will not produce what the rules require, the other side files a motion to compel. If the court grants it and the party still refuses, Rule 37 lets the judge escalate. The available penalties include:

• Ordering the disobedient party to pay the reasonable expenses, including attorney’s fees, caused by the failure.
• Treating certain facts as established for purposes of the case, so the party loses the ability to dispute them.
• Refusing to let the party support or oppose designated claims or defenses, or barring the party from introducing certain matters into evidence.
• Striking pleadings in whole or in part, staying the proceedings until the order is obeyed, or dismissing the action.
• Rendering a default judgment against the disobedient party.

The fee award is the most common outcome. If you blow off your deposition and force the other side to reschedule and re-notice it, expect to pay for the wasted time. The rule builds in one important exception: the court will not order expenses if it finds the failure was substantially justified, or that other circumstances make an award of expenses unjust. That is a real safety valve for a party who had a legitimate reason, but it is narrow. “I forgot” and “I didn’t feel like it” do not qualify.

Discovery fights get sharpest when money is on the table and one spouse suspects the other of hiding it. In cases with businesses, complex accounts, or significant assets, the pressure to stonewall goes up, and so does the risk of sanctions. This is exactly the terrain covered in discovery in high-asset divorces, where subpoenas to banks, forensic accountants, and depositions of third parties are routine and where a refusal to disclose rarely goes unpunished.

Contempt of Court: Civil Versus Criminal

Contempt is the court’s power to enforce its own orders. In a divorce, orders pile up quickly: a standing pretrial order at filing, temporary orders on support and possession of the home, orders freezing accounts, and eventually the final judgment of divorce itself. When a party disobeys one of those orders, the other party can file a petition asking the court to hold them in contempt. In Alabama practice this petition is often called a rule nisi, and the process is governed by Rule 70A of the Alabama Rules of Civil Procedure. If your spouse is ignoring a court order, our page on the rule nisi contempt process explains how that petition works.

Rule 70A divides contempt into two kinds, and the distinction matters because it changes what the court can do to you.

Civil Contempt

Civil contempt is coercive. Its purpose is to force the disobedient party to comply, not to punish them for the sake of punishment. The classic example is a spouse who has the ability to pay court-ordered support but refuses. The court can commit that person to the custody of the sheriff until they comply. Because the sanction is meant to coerce, the person is said to “hold the keys to the jail” in their own pocket: they can end the confinement by doing what the order requires. Civil contempt can also carry a compensatory fine to reimburse the other spouse for the harm the disobedience caused, including attorney’s fees.

Criminal Contempt

Criminal contempt is punitive. It punishes past conduct that has already occurred and that cannot be undone, such as a willful violation of a clear court order or misconduct in the courtroom itself. Under Rule 70A, criminal contempt in this setting carries defined limits: a fine and a set term of confinement, with the specific ceilings spelled out in the rule. Unlike civil contempt, you cannot purge criminal contempt by later complying, because it is a penalty for what you already did.

The single most important word in any contempt analysis is “willful.” The court is not going to jail a parent who genuinely cannot pay support because they lost their job through no fault of their own. Contempt requires that the party had the ability to comply and chose not to. A spouse who wants to defend against a contempt petition almost always focuses on that point: not that the order was disobeyed, but that the disobedience was not willful. These are serious hearings with real consequences, and they are the core work of our Alabama contempt attorneys.

Hiding, Draining, or Wasting Marital Money

One of the fastest routes to a sanction is doing something with the marital finances that a court has forbidden, or that the court concludes was designed to cheat the other spouse. When a divorce is filed, many Alabama courts enter a standing order or a temporary order that restrains both parties from selling, transferring, hiding, or dissipating marital assets while the case is pending. Cleaning out a joint bank account, quietly moving money to a relative, running up debt out of spite, or selling a vehicle for cash and pocketing it can all violate that order and expose the offending spouse to contempt.

Even without a specific freeze order, wasting marital assets has consequences. When a court divides marital property, it does so equitably, meaning fairly under the circumstances rather than by an automatic fifty-fifty split. If one spouse has dissipated assets, the judge can account for that by awarding the innocent spouse a larger share of what remains, effectively charging the wasted money back against the person who blew it. How assets get classified, valued, and divided is the subject of our overview of property division in Alabama divorces, and dissipation is one of the factors that can shift a division off center.

Hiding money is worse than wasting it, because concealment usually requires lying. A spouse who omits an account from a sworn financial disclosure, or who testifies falsely at a deposition about what they own, has not just committed a discovery violation. They have opened the door to perjury exposure, which is the subject of the next section.

Perjury and False Swearing

Almost everything of consequence in a divorce is done under oath. You verify your pleadings. You swear to your financial affidavit. You testify under oath at depositions and at trial. When someone lies in one of those settings about a material fact, they are not merely risking a bad ruling. They may be committing a crime.

Alabama’s perjury statutes are found in the criminal code. Perjury in the first degree, under Alabama Code Section 13A-10-101, occurs when a person swears falsely and the false statement is material to the proceeding. It is a Class C felony. That is not a family-court sanction; it is a criminal charge that a prosecutor, not the divorce judge, would bring, and a conviction can carry a term of imprisonment and a fine. Lesser false-swearing offenses exist for statements that are not material or are made outside of an official proceeding.

In practice, a divorce judge who catches a witness in a clear, deliberate lie has options short of a criminal referral, and usually uses them. The judge can simply disbelieve everything else that witness says, which is often devastating to the liar’s case. The judge can shift attorney’s fees. And in an appropriate case, the court can refer the matter for possible prosecution. The lesson is blunt: the downside of lying under oath in a divorce is enormous, and the upside is almost always smaller than people imagine. Tell your attorney the truth, including the parts you are embarrassed about, and let the case be built on facts that will hold up.

Frivolous Filings and Bad-Faith Litigation

You can also be sanctioned not for what you hid, but for what you filed. Rule 11 of the Alabama Rules of Civil Procedure requires that every pleading, motion, and other paper be signed, and the signature certifies that the document is well grounded in fact, warranted by existing law or a good-faith argument to change it, and not filed for an improper purpose such as harassment or needless delay. A party or an attorney who violates that certification can be sanctioned under Rule 11.

Alabama also has the Litigation Accountability Act, codified at Alabama Code Section 12-19-270 and following sections. It allows a court to award reasonable attorney’s fees and costs against a party who brings an action or asserts a defense that is without substantial justification, meaning frivolous, groundless in fact or law, or interposed for delay or harassment. The court weighs a list of factors before making such an award, including whether the claim was pursued in bad faith and whether the party or lawyer should have known better.

Where this comes up in divorce is the litigant who uses the court as a weapon: filing motion after meritless motion, dragging the other side back to court on manufactured issues, or asserting positions that no reasonable reading of Alabama law supports. Judges see this behavior and they remember it. A spouse who turns a case into a war of attrition to bleed the other party financially can end up paying for the privilege. If the finances are complex, that scorched-earth strategy is especially risky, and a well-managed case focuses on real disputes and leaves the theatrics alone.

Sanctions in Child Relocation Disputes

Custody cases carry their own sanction rules, and relocation is the sharpest example. Alabama’s Parent-Child Relationship Protection Act governs what happens when a parent with primary physical custody wants to change the child’s principal residence. The Act requires the relocating parent to give the other parent advance written notice, and it gives the non-relocating parent the right to object.

The Act also contains a sanctions provision aimed at bad-faith use of the relocation process by either side. A court can sanction a person who proposes a change of the child’s principal residence, or who objects to a proposed change, when the court determines that the proposal or objection was made:

• To harass a person, or to cause unnecessary delay or a needless increase in the cost of the litigation.
• Without being warranted by existing law, or based on a frivolous argument.
• On the basis of allegations and factual contentions that had no evidentiary support, and could not reasonably be expected to have support after further investigation.
• In an effort to elicit or lead to the discovery of information that Alabama law protects from disclosure, such as information that would reveal the location of a person at risk of domestic violence.

That last category ties into the Act’s protective provisions for victims of family violence, which allow certain information to be withheld precisely so an abuser cannot use the relocation process to track down a fleeing parent and child. Relocation disputes are fact-intensive and emotionally loaded, and they sit squarely within the firm’s family law work. Because the exact code section numbers within the Parent-Child Relationship Protection Act are technical and have been amended over the years, anyone relying on this provision should confirm the current statutory citation before filing.

When Your Own Attorney Can Be Sanctioned

Sanctions are not only for the parties. An attorney can be sanctioned too, and sometimes the attorney and the client are sanctioned jointly. Under Rule 11, the lawyer’s signature on a frivolous filing exposes the lawyer, not just the client. Under Rule 37, a lawyer who advises a client to stonewall discovery can be ordered to pay the resulting expenses. And the Alabama Rules of Professional Conduct impose independent duties of candor to the court, fairness to the opposing party, and honesty in all professional dealings. A lawyer who engages in professional misconduct, including conduct involving dishonesty or misrepresentation, can face court sanctions in the case and separate discipline from the Alabama State Bar.

For you as a client, the practical takeaway is that a good attorney will sometimes tell you no. When a lawyer refuses to file a motion you want filed, or declines to make an argument you think is clever, it is often because the lawyer sees a Rule 11 problem or an ethics problem that you do not. That is the system working. A lawyer who will file anything a client demands is a liability, not an asset.

Who Pays: Attorney’s Fees as a Sanction

The thread running through almost every sanction discussed here is money, and specifically attorney’s fees. Alabama follows the general American rule that each side pays its own lawyer, but that rule bends in several situations common to divorce. Alabama Code Section 30-2-54 allows a court in a divorce or a related contempt proceeding to order one spouse to pay the other’s attorney’s fees. Rule 37 authorizes fee awards for discovery abuse. Rule 11 and the Litigation Accountability Act authorize fee awards for frivolous or bad-faith conduct. And civil contempt can carry a compensatory fee award to make the wronged spouse whole.

What this means in real life is that misconduct is expensive twice. First you pay your own lawyer to do the improper thing, and then the court can order you to pay the other side’s lawyer to clean up after it. A spouse who is deciding whether to hide an account, skip a deposition, or file a harassing motion should run that math before acting. The person who plays the case straight almost never ends up funding the other side’s legal bill.

How to Protect Yourself From Sanctions

The good news is that avoiding sanctions is not complicated. It does not require legal genius. It requires doing a handful of unglamorous things consistently:

• Obey every court order, even the ones you think are unfair. The place to fight an order you disagree with is a motion or an appeal, not disobedience. Ignoring an order you dislike is how ordinary people end up in contempt.
• Show up. Attend your deposition, your hearings, and your mediation. If a genuine emergency prevents it, tell your attorney immediately so the absence can be excused or rescheduled the right way.
• Disclose everything. List every account, every debt, every asset on your financial affidavit. Hidden money almost always surfaces, and when it does, the concealment hurts you far more than the money ever helped.
• Tell your lawyer the truth. Your attorney can defend against almost any fact if they know it in advance. What they cannot defend is a surprise, especially a lie that gets exposed at trial.
• Do not use the case as a weapon. Filing motions to harass, or objecting to reasonable requests just to run up costs, is exactly the conduct Rule 11 and the Litigation Accountability Act punish.

Most contested divorces resolve without anyone being sanctioned, because most people, once they understand the stakes, choose to follow the rules. When the other side will not follow them, sanctions become a tool you can use, and an experienced attorney will know when and how to ask the court for relief.

Common Questions About Divorce Sanctions in Alabama

Can I be sanctioned just for disagreeing with my spouse?

No. Sanctions are for misconduct in the process, not for taking a position. You are entitled to contest custody, argue about alimony, and dispute how property should be divided. What you cannot do is disobey orders, hide information, lie under oath, or abuse the litigation to harass the other side.

What happens if my spouse refuses to turn over financial documents?

Your attorney files a motion to compel. If the court orders production and your spouse still refuses, Rule 37 lets the judge impose sanctions, from ordering your spouse to pay the fees caused by the refusal, up to striking pleadings or entering a default. Persistent refusal to disclose finances is one of the most sanctionable things a party can do.

Will I go to jail if I miss a support payment?

Not automatically. Civil contempt for nonpayment requires that you had the ability to pay and willfully chose not to. If you genuinely cannot pay because of a job loss or other real change, the answer is to file to modify the order and to document your situation, not to ignore it. Willful refusal, on the other hand, can lead to confinement until you comply.

Does an uncontested divorce carry any of this risk?

Very little. Sanctions arise out of contested litigation: discovery fights, disobeyed orders, and bad-faith filings. An uncontested divorce, where both spouses agree on all terms and sign a settlement, sidesteps almost all of it. For reference, our flat fee for an uncontested divorce is $690 without minor children of the marriage, or $890 with minor children of the marriage, in each case plus the county filing fee. A contested case, by contrast, is billed against a retainer that generally starts around $4,000 and depends on the complexity of the dispute.

Talk to The Harris Firm LLC

If you are worried that your spouse is hiding assets, ignoring a court order, or dragging out your case in bad faith, or if you have been accused of misconduct yourself, do not try to sort it out alone. The rules around sanctions are technical, the stakes can include your money and your freedom, and the right move depends on the specific facts of your case.

The Harris Firm LLC handles contested and uncontested divorce, custody, and contempt matters across Alabama, with offices in Birmingham, Chelsea, Huntsville, and Montgomery. Call us today at (205) 201-1789 to talk through your situation and find out where you stand. We will give you a straight answer about your options and what to do next.

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