Donald W. Van Artsdalen

Donald West VanArtsdalen (October 21, 1919, to May 21, 2019), whose name was printed as Van Artsdalen in the Philadelphia press, was the district attorney of Bucks County from 1954 to 1958 and a judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania from 1970 until his death at 99. In April 1985 he sentenced R.C. Horsch, then Raymond Charles Hoersch, to a year and a day for bail-jumping, consecutive to the three-year methamphetamine sentence imposed by Judge Joseph L. McGlynn Jr.¹²

Career

VanArtsdalen was born in Doylestown. He served in the Canadian Army from 1940 to 1942 and in the United States Army as a sergeant from 1942 to 1945, then took an LL.B. at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1948 and practiced law in Doylestown until 1970, serving meanwhile as Bucks County district attorney. Richard Nixon nominated him on September 10, 1970, to a new seat created by statute; he was confirmed on October 8 and commissioned on October 15, 1970. He took senior status on October 21, 1985, and died in Doylestown on May 21, 2019.¹ His wife, Marie Catherine VanArtsdalen, died in December 2016 after 63 years of marriage.³

The Hoersch Sentence

Hoersch, who had grown up in Bucks County and whose parents lived in Chalfont, had jumped bail on a 1977 federal methamphetamine charge and spent the following seven years as a fugitive, most of them in New Zealand under a stolen name. Sentencing him for the bail offense, VanArtsdalen said that fugitives must be punished "no matter how exemplary a life they may have lived" while at large.²