Imprisonment for civil contempt should be reserved for the most serious cases involving contumacious conduct; in the absence of findings of contumacy, fines will ordinarily be the appropriate sanction. The threshold for relevance of ill-health in sentencing is not that imprisonment be 'particularly onerous' but that it would impose a greater burden on the offender. The parity principle applies to contempt sentencing such that comparable contemnors for comparable conduct should receive comparable sentences. A sentencing judge must take age and ill-health into account in fixing the sentence itself, not merely in determining the period of suspension.
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