KEN FRANKLIN | September 28, 2015
Over the past few years, I have thoroughly enjoyed my involvement with the Safe Families Office, co-run by Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation and the Partnership Against Domestic Violence. Safe Families pairs volunteer attorneys with clients to represent the clients at hearings for 12-month protective orders. The objective of Safe Families is to safeguard clients from future domestic violence. Not only does the Safe Families Office give me a great opportunity to get out of my office and into the courtroom, but it also allows me to use my legal education to make a genuine difference in someone else’s life.
As with all of my cases, I want to walk away with a win. Sometimes, however, the circumstances of a domestic violence case make that goal an uphill battle. Without extrinsic evidence, such as a police report, pictures of bruising, or impartial witnesses testimony, the Court might be hesitant to issue a protective order. When the case turns on he said, she said testimony, the likelihood that the Court will not grant the protective order increases significantly. In those cases, I just hope that the client having filed the petition and shown up at the hearing will be enough to deter future abuse. As I recently discovered, the Court’s refusal to grant the protective order will actually embolden the abuser.
In my most recent case, the client and the respondent had been together for over ten years. Although they never married, they had several children together. The respondent was overtly abusive early in the relationship; but, recently, his abuse had become more subtle. In one instance, he put drugs into the client’s drink in order to have sex with her. Luckily, the client saw the pill dissolving at the bottom of her drink before she drank it. The respondent also controlled who the client could see and when she could see them, even going so far as to track her location through her cell phone. And, after the client finally made the decision to leave the respondent, the respondent engaged in an extensive stalking campaign, even showing up at her brother’s house in Alabama. Because the client did not have any evidence other than her story, we were not able to obtain a protective order. After the hearing, I apologized to the client and told her that if the respondent did anything else that frightened her, she should go back to the Safe Families Office right away.
The very next day, the respondent was back at it. When the client showed up at an appointment with the Atlanta Housing Authority in order to find a new, safe place to live, the respondent was there waiting for her in the parking lot. He walked with her into the waiting room and sat down with her while she was waiting for her appointment. Luckily, the Housing Authority employees acted quickly after the client notified them of the situation and had a security guard escort the respondent out of the building. After about 10 minutes, the security guard received a report that there was a man in the parking lot trying to break into a car. When he went out to investigate, he found the respondent by the client’s car. The respondent finally left when the security guard threatened to call the police, but he did not go too far.
Unnerved by the respondent showing up at the Atlanta Housing Authority, the client immediately went to the Safe Families Office after her meeting. Unbelievably, the respondent followed her to the courthouse and waited there the whole time the respondent was filing the new petition. The respondent did not leave until the sheriff’s office served him.
When the Safe Families Office called me to let me know what had happened and that the client was filing a new petition, I was more than happy to have a chance to take another bite at the apple. Thanks to assistance of the Atlanta Housing Authority to assist us, this time we had something we did not have before: impartial witnesses testimony. The security guard testified about the respondent following the client into her meeting, and further told the court about threatening to call the police after the respondent has been seen trying to break into the client’s car. The security guard further testified that the respondent had returned to the Housing Authority two more times to try and discovery why the client has been there. Thanks to the testimony from the security guard, the Court saw that this really was a dangerous situation and entered the protective order.
If it had not been for the Safe Families Program, I hate to think of what could have happened to the client because the respondent was genuinely crazy but came off as very calm and polished at the hearings. If you want to really help people get out of dangerous situations, I strongly encourage you to give Jamie Perez, the new Project Director of the Safe Families Office, or Julia Black, the Program Coordinator, a call. This is a fantastic program run by even more fantastic people.