Battered Justice
Meier, Joan
BATTERED JUSTICE by Joan Meier Everyone knows women are beaten. Why won't the law do anything about it? Last August in Somerville, Massachusetts, Pamela Nigro-Dunn was coming home from...
...We're doing a terrible disservice to the taxpayers here...
...He always found her...
...Frequently a batterer goes through a period of contrition after an attack, pleading with the woman to stay and promising never to hurt her again...
...It can be almost impossible for a woman to relocate, especially when she has children to care for or when she has no independent income...
...The tragic irony of this case was that Pat White wanted nothing more than to have her husband out of the house...
...Presiding Judge Henry Tempone is even worse than Heffernan, she says...
...Meier: Your Honor Wood: And I would say go to divorce court...
...Let them look into the domestic matters...
...When called for help, police rarely make arrests...
...Public defender: They are living in the same house...
...Other states soon followed suit, including North Carolina, which held in the case mentioned above that the state should not interfere in cases of "domestic chastisement" unless "permanent injury or excessive violence" was involved...
...If she cares for the man at all, it is difficult to reject his pleas and promises, and particularly difficult to send While the police watched, her husband dropped the bloody knife, kicked her in the head, went into the house, came back out, dropped her child on her, kicked her in the head again, and walked around the crowd that had gathered to watch...
...To put it crudely: "If she doesn't take it seriously enough to stay away, why should society take it seriously enough to arrest the man...
...Nor is the problem limited to male judges...
...Yet another recent D.C...
...When pressed for his reasons for dropping the charges in the Williams case, Joseph DiGenova, the U.S...
...They were the victims of the most extreme form of wife battering but represent only a fraction of those who have suffered from what appears to be an epidemic of violence within marriages...
...and take that back with you...
...There was no subtlety, however, in the response to Tracy Thurmon, who later won a suit against the Torrington, Connecticut, police department...
...The legal system also makes it impossible for women to avoid their batterers when it enforces the man's "rights!' Even if Dawn could somehow escape Jimmy, she would still have to be in contact with him by order of the court since he has been awarded visitation rights with their baby...
...They also reason that, as one said, "when people are in a relationship, I assume she could leave and avoid the man if she wanted to...
...The police told the man that if the couple had lived together at least six months, making them common law husband and wife, they couldn't do anything...
...Judge Wood's view is not unique...
...In some studies, as many as 80 percent of complaints were dropped by the complainant before prosecution...
...When Denver recently adopted a pro-arrest policy, arrests jumped 60 percent one year and 46 percent the next...
...He then asked Jimmy, but not the women, if he was hurt...
...Pamela asked Heffernan to order Paul Dunn out of the apartment, but the judge refused and then asked her, "Did he demonstrate this type of behavior before you married him...
...Not until he approached her a third time, as she lay on a stretcher, did the police arrest him...
...Eventually he got restless and left, taking his two-yearold son and warning Leedonyell not to tell anyone what had...
...Metropolitan Police Department stated that "nationally, more police officers were injured while responding to disturbance calls than in any other type of call for service...
...This reluctance to arrest is corroborated by studies conducted in the late seventies in Colorado and California that showed only 5 to 6 percent of domestic violence complaints to the police resulted in arrest...
...Instead, they simply advised Dawn to go to the hospital for her bleeding cheek and eye...
...The murderer was arrested three months later in Florida...
...Simply put, many judges are hostile to these cases, and, it appears, to the victims...
...When he got inside, a shelter worker was holding Jimmy down, but the officer, smiling, addressed Jimmy: "What's up Jimmy, what are you doing in here...
...presumably reasoning that, if the husband had hit her before they were married, she was not entitled to police protection if she was beaten—however badly— after she was married...
...Although some women judges are among the best on domestic violence issues, others are known for their impatience and hostility...
...A philosophy student named Nicholas Boyce had strangled his wife, hacked her body into small pieces, and cooked some of them to make them look like leftovers from "a Sunday lunch ." The remains were then distributed at various points around London...
...But it is perhaps even more appalling that so many are further abused by the criminal justice system...
...Investigations in New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, and other states have found widespread patterns of judicial insensitivity to women, including stereotyping, treatment of women as property, as well as a tendency to "blame the victim" in domestic violence cases...
...It is also the residue of a long historical tradition whereby laws pertaining to violence in the family not only permitted this one-sidedness, but approved of it...
...Go to divorce court...
...On the last occasion, he forced her into the car, held a knife to her neck, then thrust her head out the car window and choked her...
...Chicago's domestic violence court, for instance, now ranks with the traffic court as the training ground for new judges...
...Even though the project did not show a reduction in violence, it was hailed as a success...
...Sure enough, she wouldn't follow through and we'd think: 'It's always the same with these cases.' " The self-fulfilling prophecy can be taken to extremes...
...WIFE-BEATING AND THE RIGHTS OF MEN Underlying the reluctance of the criminal justice system to intervene in spouse-battering cases is a widely held belief in the longstanding legal doctrine of "family privacy...
...State's Attorney Michael Balksus: We would like to stress the seriousness of the crime to the defendant, and make sure that he is well aware that under the Order of Protection he cannot threaten or harass the complainant or have any sort of physical contact with her in any unlawful manner...
...National surveys have suggested that as many as one out of four married couples endure at least one act of serious violence during their marriage...
...In D.C., police concede they have always been authorized- to make arrests for misdemeanors they didn't witness...
...In some offices special "cooling off' periods are imposed in the expectation that the woman will change her mind...
...You don't get promotion for prosecuting domestic violence cases," says Ora Schub, an attorney for disabled and battered women...
...One prosecutor later explained, "It appeared to be a domestic dispute over child custody...
...And it usually is not an isolated event but part of a pattern of escalating violence...
...Heffernan then turned to her husband and said, "You want to gnaw on her and she on you fine, but let's not do it at the taxpayers' expense...
...When his sister tried to stop him, he threw her against a dresser...
...Prosecutors most often attribute the failure to prosecute to the woman's ambivalence about pressing her complaint...
...It is not uncommon for abusers to sit in the courtroom and intimidate a woman into dropping the charges...
...Suits like Thurman's have been brought against police departments in numerous other cities and states, including New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Alaska, and Ohio...
...But Leedonyell did tell the police...
...This refusal to treat violence as criminal as long as the woman is still in contact with the man is a strange way to apply the law...
...Augustine noted the wisdom of his mother's subservience to his father: "Many women, whose faces were disfigured by blows from husbands far sweeter tempered than her own...
...But not in this case...
...In sentencing him to only six years in jail, the judge noted that Mr...
...In a recent poll in New Jersey, almost two-thirds of respondents of both sexes said that police should take only non-punitive action, such as giving warnings or cooling things down, rather than arresting men who beat their wives...
...Now if she's going to live with him for whatever reasons and then is going to ask the Court to tell him not to hit me [sic] this is ridiculous and stupid...
...In her many attempts to get away from her abuser, Dawn Ronan went to her parents' , a shelter with a supposedly secret address, and the house of a shelter counselor...
...And since most petitioners have no attorney, they don't know how to file an appeal anyway...
...The next day Scott shot and killed Leedonyell on the stairs of her apartment...
...Petitioners often need emergency relief, making a time consuming appeal of little use...
...Consequently, many killings were predictable and could have been stopped...
...The problem is worse in domestic violence cases, since the one avenue that serves as a modest constraint, appeal, is rarely taken...
...We do not want him threatening to kill her...
...The failure of judicial self-regulation was particularly evident in the case of one judge in Massachusetts who was found in the course of divorce proceedings to have severely beaten his wife at least three times...
...Shortly thereafter he murdered her...
...BATTERED JUSTICE by Joan Meier Everyone knows women are beaten...
...By the time they arrived, he had already stabbed her in front of the house...
...Meier: Your Honor Wood: This is a criminal court, do you understand...
...The agreement had to be approved by the judge to be enforceable...
...The prosecution cannot appeal an acquittal of an abuser in a criminal case...
...him to jail...
...A study of the Minneapolis Police Department by the Police Foundation concluded that when the officer "advised" the suspect and did not lock him up, violence recurred within the next six months in 37 percent of the cases...
...They frequently mention that such cases are hard to win...
...when the suspect was arrested, even if he wasn't prosecuted later, violence recurred in only 19 percent of the cases...
...These historical traditions persist on some level in our society...
...Advocate for Complainant, Joan Meier: Your honor, may I interrupt to fill in some details...
...Last August in Somerville, Massachusetts, Pamela Nigro-Dunn was coming home from work and got off the bus at the stop where her mother met her each day...
...And, she adds, "there are no consequences for screwing up these cases...
...More importantly, women drop charges for the same reason they don't leave their abusers: fear...
...Boyce was devoted to his children and that "a man of reasonable self-control might have been similarly provoked and might have done what [he] did ." The American legal system adopted the husband's right of domestic chastisement...
...Barbara Nelson withdrew her request...
...This domestic violence is one-sided: 85-95 percent of assault victims and two-thirds of domestic murder victims are women...
...They simply don't— sometimes not even when they can see blood streaming down a woman's face...
...D.C...
...Catherine Klein, who has worked with about five hundred battered women over the past five years, cannot recall a single arrest that happened without her intervention...
...attorney for the District of Columbia, said he was "satisfied that everything was done properly," and that the decision had been "handled according to guidelines" As to what those guidelines called for, he would say only "a host of factors" such as the arresting officer's "impressions" and prosecutors' "experience...
...Similarly, the murder of Leedonyell Williams in Washington, D.C., this past summer was committed the day after charges against her attacker were dropped...
...But the assumption that women have control over the situation is mistaken...
...But in the four years I have represented battered women in Chicago and Washington, D.C., it has become clear that little has changed since the New York case...
...When they do, prosecutors rarely bring charges...
...They always said they couldn't do anything because he was my husband," recalls Jean Cook, whose husband had, on various occasions, thrown a brick through her window, broken a beer bottle over her head, threatened to kill her, and lurked with a gun around the shelter where she was staying...
...happened or he would kill the baby...
...Thurman said the police frequented the restaurant where her husband worked and that he had boasted to them that he intended to kill her...
...At best, such policies help the victim...
...The truth is, if prosecutors want these cases to go forward, they usually will...
...When she and her mother resisted, he threw mace into her mother's face...
...Witnesses of the infamous killing of Kitty Genovese said they failed to call the police while she screamed because they thought her attacker was her husband...
...Advocates frequently comment that even the slightest acknowledgment from an official that women do not deserve to be beaten can give victims an enormous boost of strength and energy to take action to end the abuse...
...Cook was not truly free of her husband's terrorizing until he was finally put in jail and she left the state...
...Both reasons contain a kernel of truth...
...Angela Browne, a social psychologist at the University of New Hampshire, says, "Some women who have left an abusive partner have been followed and harrassed for months and even years...
...victim, who had been held hostage all of one night and hit repeatedly in the head with a hammer, was told by the police, "he'd have to kill you or damn near kill you" for them to take any action...
...But few are aware of the shocking way that violence is ignored by the criminal justice system...
...Why would she...
...The complaining witness has filed for divorce...
...Five days later, she returned to court to obtain a police escort so she could return to the apartment for her clothes...
...Some research indicates that the police nonenforcement policy toward domestic violence is not limited to spousal violence but extends to other incidents where the parties know each other, such as barroom brawls...
...I'm not going to enter any order like this...
...But offices such as Los Angeles's are the exception...
...Jimmy Smith broke into the shelter where Dawn Ronan was staying and attacked several of those who lived there...
...Balksus: That is correct...
...You don't have to be afraid of me...
...attorney with bloody clothes, two eyewitnesses, and three affidavits as corroborating evidence...
...Although some battered women's advocates worry that taking the decision out of the woman's hands is merely "revictimizing" her, at least one prosecutor says, "I have seen relief on a woman's face...
...One study showed that bystanders are far less likely to intervene in a physical fight between a man and a woman if they believe they are married or intimate...
...He choked me and threatened to kill me if I try to leave...
...Our gruesome heritage goes back at least to 1800 B.C., when the Hammurabi Code officially decreed the wife was subservient to her husband, who as head of the household, had the right to inflict punishment on any member of the household for any transgression...
...The perception, shared by many people, is that women in some way consent to the violence by being in a relationship with the man...
...should...
...Wood: Okay, and after having heard it and considered everything this is my considered judgment: one year social service supervision, August 23...
...The police, called in from the street by the sister, again refused to arrest because they had not "seen" the assault, even though there was a witness...
...Vicky Vossen, several judges in Manhattan frequently refuse to grant orders of protection when the parties have been seeing each other...
...That's it...
...The refusal of the police and courts to insist that domestic violence is a crime allows people to go on believing it's not so bad...
...Pamela moved out...
...Standards for when to prosecute are, if anything, more vague and discretionary than police standards for arrest...
...From restaurant to shelter, from shelter to work, to and from church, wherever she went, he tracked and harassed her...
...Most prosecutors will admit that they view domestic assaults differently...
...The out-ofcourt settlement required the police department to change its policies and was hailed as a turning point in the country's police and court treatment of domestic violence cases...
...Prosecutors who won't prosecute The most understandable reason police give for their reluctance to arrest is their belief that such cases are not likely to be prosecuted...
...to the attention of the police, prosecutors, or courts...
...At last count, 11 states had made spousal violence a specific crime, separate from the general category of assault...
...woman was on the floor being kicked by her boyfriend when the police arrived...
...Still, prosecutors often refuse to take a case even when evidence of physical abuse is strong...
...When later asked why, one officer responded that Barbara had seemed more excited and hysterical than her husband...
...Even battered women advocates agree that this ambivalence can be a problem...
...Many judges appear to share the opinion of Massachusetts Judge Tempone, who said, in refusing a woman's plea to deny her batterer visitation rights, "Even Dellinger could have made a good father...
...Wood: It certainly is a problem...
...gone for treatment after being kicked in the back by Jimmy Smith, her boyfriend and the father of her child...
...Some women blame themselves, believing the batterers when they say they had it coming...
...The low priority these cases are given within a department sends clear signals to the young prosecutor looking to move up the ranks: If they want to catch the attention of their bosses they need high win rates and "glory cases...
...After three calls, a policeman came but stood outside at least ten minutes before coming in...
...Her body was found in a garbage dump nine hours later...
...If siblings or friends get into a fight we do not automatically view it as a "crime!' Rather than ask the state to settle family disputes, we expect and prefer that people settle such problems themselves...
...When she arrived, he said, he would shoot both of them and himself...
...I don't think it's the role of this Court to decide down to each piece of underwear who owns what," Heffernan said...
...If the message is clear, the actual punishment is less important...
...She didn't go back to court to seek further protection...
...Roughly 1,350 women were killed by their spouses, ex-spouses, or boyfriends in 1985...
...And I see you have a surprised look, but I think it is ridiculous to have people living together and then you're going to have the court say, don't do this...
...The police refused to arrest Jimmy because they hadn't seen the assault...
...Complainants are then largely protected from their abusers' intimidation...
...He locks me in and takes the phone cord out...
...It's a domestic problem...
...yet a handful of states still don't provide even that much relief without a divorce or some other civil action...
...Violence is violence Slowly, things are changing...
...We do not let a savage mugger go because his victim unwisely walked down a dark alley late at night...
...Despite a probation order barring him from further harassment, he assaulted her twice and repeatedly threatened and harassed her...
...Denise Wiktor, a D.C...
...Other police departments, including D.0 .'s, are beginning to adopt policies that favor arrests or require that domestic violence cases be treated no differently from other assault cases...
...More important, many women don't leave their spouses for fear that the violence will get worse...
...In Jean Cook's case, a mere warning letter from her attorney to her abuser brought a sudden halt to seven months of almost daily harassment...
...He has threatened to kill her several times, particularly if she brings him into court...
...Coalition Against Domestic Violence...
...Meier: The law permits you to and suggests that you...
...in 50 percent they had been called at least five times in the preceding two years...
...There are many reasons for the reluctance of police, prosecutors, and judges to handle these cases, but at the root is the belief that wife-beating is simply not criminal behavior...
...As one former abuser said in the National Institute of Justice report: "It was such an extreme experience having actually been arrested and dealt with rather harshly...
...Wood: If people live together, how do you control human behavior...
...The officer stood silent when Jimmy said to Dawn, "I'm going to kill you, if that's the last thing I do...
...knew well enough how hot tempered a husband my mother had to cope with" Around 1140 A.D., the church codified its rules, stating that a wife is obliged to submit to the punishment of her husband...
...Boyce testified that his wife had cast slurs on his manhood and provoked him by breaking his pipes...
...Meier: It is a problem...
...After Duluth, Minnesota, instituted a mandatory arrest program, 70 of a group of 86 women reported at the end of two years that the combined assistance of police, courts, and shelters was helpful in ending their abusers' violence...
...Unfortunately, experts in domestic violence now agree that mediation as a substitute for arrest is the wrong answer when there is violence...
...And that is why we would like a warning about threats...
...When police respond to a domestic call, tempers are usually still hot, and often get hotter at the sight of a cop...
...That doctrine was given its most eloquent expression by an 1868 North Carolina court that ruled in State v. Rhodes: "However great are the evils of ill temper, quarrels, and even personal conflicts inflicting only temporary pain, they are not comparable with the evils which would result from raising the curtain and exposing to public curiosity and criticism the nursery and the bed chamber!' It is true that we accept sorts of family physical contact that we wouldn't allow strangers: parents can spank their kids but strangers are forbidden to touch other peoples children...
...Police should usually be applauded for their efforts to be more humane, but it is curious, given their occupational bias toward punishing offenders, that they eagerly embrace a soft approach towards domestic violence...
...Barbara Nelson's husband, who was finally arrested and jailed after ten years of violence now says, "There's nothing I want to do enough to go back there...
...There is something short of that that could resolve the situation...
...Even the saintly Sir Thomas More described the Puritan ideal in his Utopia, where "the husbands chastise their wives!' In medieval Europe, feudal law made wives their husbands' chattel, with wifely disobedience enforced by community punishments such as iron muzzles with spikes that depressed the tongue...
...In August 1983, I was an advocate in Chicago for a battered woman who wanted her abuser prosecuted for assault and an order of protection issued barring him from harassing her again...
...When Jean Cook now says, "I didn't give up all my rights when I got married," she has the support of at least two federal courts...
...The reason...
...He was her husband...
...Anne Ganley, a psychologist and counselor for batterers, "Perpetrators tend to minimize and deny the violence and place the blame on others ?' Therefore, she says, it is crucial that batterers be held responsible for their violence...
...Early last year, for example, the D.C...
...One 1983 study by the D.C...
...One speaker in the House of Commons energetically insisted that "the country should treat its married women no worse than it treated its domestic animals" The difficult question of what constituted "moderate castigation" was resolved by devising "the rule of thumb," providing that a man could beat his wife with a stick "no larger around than his thumb?' Just last year, a British judge in the main criminal court at Old Bailey indicated that his country may not have progressed much since that rule...
...we may have even told her so...
...But wife-beating is different from other forms of family violence...
...Similarly, Don Pfouts, a detective with the Baltimore City Police Department who has been reviewing his department's records, confirms that domestic calls are "not that dangerous...
...The man said six months...
...Judge Wood's suggestion that the case be dealt with in domestic relations court is also ironic in light of the refrain frequently heard by battered women from civil court judges, such as the Somerville, Massachusetts, district court judge, who said, "Hey, sister, if things are that tough, file a criminal complaint ." Judges sometimes claim that they dislike domestic assault cases because orders of protection, central to most domestic violence cases in both civil and criminal courts, are ineffective...
...Many states, however, have changed the law so police can make misdemeanor arrests in domestic violence cases without having seen the assault if there is sufficient evidence of probable cause...
...In Seattle, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles, prosecutors refuse to allow victims to drop charges after they are filed...
...Even if the couple stays together, outside disapproval can make both aware that the man does not have "the right to beat" the woman...
...She received a restraining order, but the judge refused to give her police protection...
...She moved back to her parents', and her mother began accompanying her to and from the busstop because they had seen Paul circling in his car...
...Wood: Order of Protection is denied...
...And when cases are brought to court, judges too often have the attitude of Paul Heffernan, the Massachusetts judge who was sitting on the bench when Pamela Nigro-Dunn requested help...
...Although appeal is possible for protection orders, in most cases it is simply impractical...
...On the day of the trial the defendant agreed to one year of court-supervised counseling and a oneyear order of protection...
...Twelve battered wives sued the city police department and family court for failing to arrest and prosecute men who attacked their wives—simply because the victim and assailant were married...
...Pamela Nigro-Dunn had been to court four times trying to stop her husband's attacks before she was murdered...
...For example, he told one woman, "You don't look beat up to me...
...Nowhere is it written that behavior can be criminal only if the victim has done everything possible to avoid her attacker...
...apartment of Leedonyell Williams, his former girlfriend and the mother of his two children, he held a gun to her head and sat waiting at the dining room table for her mother to come home...
...Some states have historically prohibited arrests on misdemeanor—though not felony—charges unless the police have witnessed the crime...
...In the early 1900s, some American courts began to permit wives to sue their husbands for civil assault...
...Similarly, in December 1985, D.C...
...The attorney still refused to prosecute, citing "insufficient evidence...
...Yet violence against a woman in her own home is not considered a crime because she stays in the house...
...Although in recent years several cities have moved toward reform, domestic violence remains at best a low priority...
...The hands-off approach that still operates in most police departments gained theoretical justification in the early seventies when social work alternatives to punishment were popular for a number of offenses, including drug use and prostitution...
...The police consistently refused to respond to her calls...
...In the landmark New York case, a policeman who had been called to a scene where a man had stabbed his wife with a knife, said to the husband, "Maybe if I beat my wife, she'd act right too:' Police sympathies can be more subtly expressed...
...Unfortunately, the judiciary is for the most part invulnerable to reform, as strong peer review and discipline is rare, and judges, particularly those with life tenure, are effectively accountable to no one...
...police were called by nurses at a hospital where Dawn Ronan*, who was five months pregnant, had *Some of the victims' names have been changed...
...some have been killed!' Jean Cook left her husband only to begin seven months of moving from shelter to shelter in an attempt to hide from him...
...But I'm not going to take up time with this...
...While misperceptions about women's ability to end the violence may make the reluctance of police to arrest more understandable, their behavior in many instances indicates something far worse: an identification with the male attacker and a lack of sympathy for the woman...
...In the first affidavit Pamela filed, just six weeks after her wedding, she stated, "I'm a prisoner in my apartment...
...This is pretty trivial...
...Not until he approached Thurman a third time, as she lay on a stretcher, did the police arrest him...
...But recent FBI Uniform Crime Reports show that police fears are overstated and that a domestic call is one of the least likely of all calls to lead to assaults on officers or to their deaths...
...They are living in the house together, not happily...
...this is a criminal court...
...Why don't police arrest these abusers...
...About two weeks after the baby was born he found her there and attacked her in her bed, splitting her cheek open with a belt buckle, and cutting her eye with the heavy ring he wore...
...In most cases, the victims had brought their abusers' earlier assaults Joan Meier is an attorney with Public Citizen Litigation Group and a member of the board of directors of the Washington D.C...
...Many people are aware that wife-beating is a problem...
...Pamela moved in with her parents, but after pressure from Paul to return and promises that he'd reform, she reconciled with him for several weeks...
...Judges's attitudes towards these cases may be symptomatic of a larger problem...
...it's not worth it to go back...
...She had been shot, strangled, and stabbed...
...Only when Dawn got angry did the officer finally take action: He insisted that she go inside...
...Its only enforcement is in the event of a violation ." But judges rarely express reluctance to convict a repeat burglar merely because jail does not deter recidivists from resuming their crimes...
...Judge William Wood: This is a husband and wife situation...
...TWice, when she sought court protection he assaulted her the next day...
...Where there has been murder, there has usually been a history of beating...
...Other well-intended psychologists followed suit...
...After the police arrested Leedonyell Williams's assailant, Michael Scott, neither the victim nor her mother was told when the attorneys would review the case to decide whether to charge Scott, nor were they told that they should be present...
...police officers typically say they are reluctant to arrest wife-beaters because these "fights" —a term reflecting a belief that spousal violence is minor and mutual— "are much more dangerous for police...
...Yet, as is common practice, the prosecutor decided to drop the charges, in large part because Williams did not show up...
...The police then asked how long the two had lived together...
...We reported some really outrageous stuff, and even though the prosecutor's supervisor was supportive of our complaint, nothing even went down on the prosecutor's record!' Judges who won't convict Prosecutors' attitudes are shaped in part by those of the judges before whom they appear...
...In the rare case where a prosecutor presses charges, it is almost always as a misdemeanor rather than a felony, regardless of the severity of the assault...
...It's time to teach a different set of lessons...
...The abuse resumed...
...By 1977, a national survey of the larger police departments found that more than 70 percent had implemented some kind of family crisis intervention training program...
...Approval of out-of-court settlements is usually little more than a formality...
...It'll never happen again, it was my fault," is a common refrain heard by Vicky Vossen, an assistant district attorney in Manhattan...
...The legal excuses often give way to the real reasons for not arresting...
...attorney, recalls on one occasion presenting a U.S...
...Meier: She would be happy to ask the Court for him to leave, but she understands there is an agreement being made...
...A man drove up and insisted Nigro-Dunn get into his car...
...We do not expect someone who is attacked by a burglar in his own home to crawl out the back window...
...In ruling that the Torrington police department violated Tracy Thurman's civil rights, the federal district court firmly stated that a "man is not allowed to physically abuse or endanger a woman merely because he is her husband" and it held that the police cannot avoid making arrests "simply because the assaulter and his victim are married to each other!' The jury awarded Thurman $2.3 million...
...Wood: I assume they are not living together...
...Then we sent her back home, often back to her abuser, without any support or protection at all...
...He also told the Globe that he believed that most women seeking orders of protection were lying...
...Because there was a bench warrant out on him already for failure to appear in a traffic case, they arrested Scott...
...police were called to the home of Barbara Nelson after her husband, who no longer lived there, broke into the house, brandishing a razor and yelling, "I'm going to kill you and that nigger in the basement" There was no other man in the house, When Nelson asked the police to arrest him, they refused...
...she denies they had ever lived together...
...When Michael Anthony Scott broke into the Washington, D.C...
...Justice Department funding, although far lower than in the past, now supports eight demonstration projects to develop new policies and procedures for police and prosecutors...
...The police left...
...All have been won or settled on terms favorable to the plaintiffs, and have required police to stop discriminating against married women or girlfriends who ask for help...
...It follows a pattern of violence that increases in intensity over time, and is onesided...
...Nowhere to hide Underlying police reluctance to arrest is the feeling that domestic violence is not a real crime...
...In 1970, Morton Bard, a clinical psychologist, set up a demonstration project to teach police special counseling skills for intervening in family disputes...
...A firm criminal justice response works...
...How about Manson...
...Let them put an injunction against him...
...Yet he continued to preside over domestic violence cases for two more years before retiring with an unblemished record...
...In most offices, domestic assault cases are simply not considered desirable or important...
...But in many states, including California, Massachusetts, and New York, "spousal immunity" prohibited such suits until the late sixties or early seventies, when states began passing laws giving women the right to obtain orders of protection...
...The probability of victim cooperation is in fact better predicted by the conduct of the prosecutor than by the conduct of either the victim or the defendant," says Lerman...
...Then the officer escorted him out of the house and proceeded to smoke a cigarette with him, both of them talking and laughing...
...She had successfully prosecuted her husband in 1982 for repeatedly beating her and threatening her and their child's life...
...Society punishes behavior it finds morally opprobrious...
...It is appalling that so many women suffer as Pamela did at the hands of their spouses...
...We really don't get involved," they explained to the nurse...
...In June 1983, Thurman called the police again when her husband came to her house...
...Francis G. Poitrast, the chief justice of the Somerville juvenile court, told The Boston Globe that judges are frustrated with "abuse cases" because the orders are just "an empty shell...
...Another French statute: "All the inhabitants of Villefranche have the right to beat their wives so long as death does not follow?' In 19th-century Britain, some legislators tried to reduce the suffering of women...
...According to Lisa Lerman, an attorney and noted author in the field, prosecutors often hide behind complainants' ambivalence...
...Jimmy Smith tracked her down each time...
...These are very, very difficult decisions to make because of the regularity with which the complainant refuses to go forward," DiGenova told The Washington Post...
...Why do the victims drop charges...
...She was wearing a full-length coat...
...My life is in danger so long as he is around...
...After hearing of the murder, another prosecutor said, "It's just one of those horrible, bizarre things . . . . You deal with a thousand of these kinds of cases and 999 of them turn out as you expect them to: just a domestic problem?' Prosecutors in many jurisdictions are known to avoid prosecuting domestic cases...
...According to Dr...
...The Roman Code of Paterfamilias elaborated: "If you should take your wife in adultery, you may with impunity put her to death without a trial, but if you should commit adultery or indecency, she must not presume to lay a finger on you, nor does the law allow it" The Code further permitted men to physically punish their wives for such activities as walking outside with their faces uncovered or attending public games without their husbands' permission...
...that I sought help...
...According to Assistant D.A...
...Canon law and religious doctrines were similar...
...Vernon Nelson, while in court, told his wife that if she got him ordered out of the house, he would burn it down...
...The right to beat was affirmed by a court in Mississippi in 1824...
...Marge Jozsa, a director of a shelter for battered women in Chicago, testified in 1984 that many women, after marrying, believe "that [her husband] has the right to be violent . . . the right to beat her if she steps out of line and doesn't follow his wishes . . . -J.M...
...If a woman does drop charges, prosecutors frequently treat a second complaint as "crying wolf' and refuse to process it...
...In San Francisco, where a "victims advocates" program gives battered women legal and moral support, 70 percent fewer of their complaints are dropped...
...One city prosecutor in a recent National Institute of Justice report stated, "We'd file if she really wanted us to, but we knew that shed want us to drop charges later...
...European lawmakers in the 17th and 18th centuries attempted to move beyond these traditions...
...Since domestic assaults usually occur behind closed doors, there are rarely witnesses and when there are, they are usually children...
...Police who won't arrest The passivity of police in dealing with domestic assaults was made clear in a landmark case in New York City in 1976...
...That police fear domestic violence cases is understandable, although it contrasts strikingly with their notion that such cases are trivial and not very dangerous for the women...
...Clerk: Order of Protection...
...Recently, the Attorney General's Task Force on Domestic Violence, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and the National Institute of Justice produced reports urging that domestic violence be treated as a serious crime...
...This is just my view...
...She had not requested that much relief for fear the judge might refuse, making her husband think he had license to beat her...
...According to Eileen McNamara, author of the Globe series that broke the Pamela Nigro-Dunn story, Judge Heffernan's behavior was not an isolated or extreme example...
...The prosecutor's office decided to drop Leedonyell's charges...
...One Minneapolis study found that in 85 percent of spousal murder cases there had been prior contact with the police...
...Fearing what might happen if she continued to live with Jimmy, Dawn moved in with his sister...
...He then escorted Jimmy to the hospital, though he had no noticeable injuries...
...Then he shot Pamela, who was five months pregnant, in the abdomen and dragged her into the car...
...He made me work only where he works...
...This court has a lot more serious matters to contend with...
...Even if the evidence weren't as clear as it is that criminal justice intervention reduces domestic violence, it would still be called for...
...While the police watched, her husband dropped the bloody knife, kicked her in the head, went into the house, came back out, dropped her child on her, kicked her in the head again, and walked around the crowd that had gathered to watch...
...One French ordinance restricted the chastisement of wives and children to "blows, thumps, kicks or punches on the back . . .which did not leave any marks," but added, "the man who is not master of his wife is not worthy of being a man...
...when I have said, 'I am sorry, I am not waiving [dropping charges] ! " In Los Angeles, the result in most cases has been that defendants plead guilty...
...Wood: I'm going to give him supervision as long as they are living together...
...Barbara Nelson was advised by a supportive police officer to tell the dispatcher there was "a man A policeman who had been called to a scene where a man had stabbed his wife with a knife, said to the husband, "Maybe if I beat my wife, she'd act right, too . " with a knife" when she called for help, rather than say "my husband has a knife!' Last January, another D.C...
Vol. 19 • May 1987 • No. 4
