COMMITMENT, in common law a warrant in writing of a magistrate, justice, or other official having police jurisdiction, directing the conveyance of a person named or sufficiently de scribed therein to a prison or other legal place of custody, and his detention therein for a time specified, or until the person to be detained has done a certain act specified in the warrant, e.g., paid a fine imposed upon him on conviction. An interval must necessarily elapse between the decision to commit and the making out of the warrant of commitment, during which interval the detention in custody of the person committed is undoubtedly legal. A commitment differs also from a warrant of arrest, in that it is not made until after the person to be detained has actually appeared, or has been summoned, before the court which orders committal, to answer to some charge.
It is ordinarily essential to a valid commitment that it should contain a specific statement of the particular cause of the deten tion ordered. To this the chief, if not the only exception, is in the case of commitments by order of either house of parliament. Commitments by justices of the peace must be under their hands and seals. Commitments by a court of record if formally drawn up are under the seal of the court.
In the case of superior courts no statutory forms of commit ment exist, and the same formalities are not so strictly enforced. Committal of a person present in court for contempt of the court is enforced by his immediate arrest by the tipstaff as soon as com mittal is ordered, and he may be detained in prison on a memo randum of the clerk or registrar of the court while a formal order is being drawn up. And in the case of persons sentenced at assizes and quarter sessions the only written authority for enforce ment is a calendar of the prisoners tried, on which the sentences are entered up, signed by the presiding judge.
Commitments are usually made by courts of criminal jurisdic tion in respect of offences against the criminal law, but are also occasionally made as a punishment for disobedience to the orders made in a civil court, e.g., where a judgment debtor having means to pay refuses to satisfy the judgment debt, or in cases where the person committed has been guilty of a direct contempt of the court. (See HABEAS CORPUS.) The term is used in substantially the same sense in the United States Federal and State courts.