Well, it is my impression that a RO is something like a crime (but you cannot defend yourself).
Given the ease with which they are issued, I guess the message is: stay away from any woman who has filed these things.
If only it were that easy :smack:
And if only they weren’t mostly used properly.
Is your name Charlie, and did no one else know the waitress’s name? Did you write a musical for her?
It’s nothing like a crime. There’s no adjudication of guilt and no punishment. The firearms issue is a problem with the federal law, not the RO procedure itself.
In a crime, you are inoccent until proven guilty. With an RO you are guilty and will stay guilty until the woman whom you have pissed off decides that you have suffered enough*.
*disclaimer .. if you really did threaten or hurt the person seeking the RO, then you deserve what you get.
For the purposes of a temporary restraining order, guilt is assumed. For the purposes of a permanent injunction, it is not.
Agreed, but that doesn’t make it right. I suppose that is okay if your Civil Rights don’t temporaraly apply that it is okay. There has to be more proof than just an accusation to restirct someone and their ability to move about freely.
The thing is if the courts are going to presume you are guilty in the first example you give, then what would give any reasonable person the expectation that they will find them not guilty in the second? This point is relevent to the OP, how can you get a RO removed if the person who asked for it sticks by the accusation. Logic would reason that if you are found “not guilty” and the RO removed that the person who ask for it should be charged with perjury if not slander. If you did enough to justify a RO there so be no reason to remove it. If there is a reason to remove it it should have never been granted in the first place.
Correct, but what establishes “guilt” is so slight as to make the issue meaningless. I would venture a guess that every poster in this thread has been “guilty” of an act of domestic violence that would warrant an RO.
Criminal guilt is irrelevant. Anecdote: My brother in law was in a fight with his live in girlfriend. She slapped the hell out of him and he was yelling at her telling her to stop. Cops show up. His face is bloodied and battered. She has red marks on her wrists consistent with him grabbing them in self-defense. SHE goes to jail and he does not.
The next day, she is released on her own recognizance and goes to the family court and is granted a TRO against HIM. (Did you read the part where she was arrested and charged with domestic battery and he was not?) He had to move out of the house and she was appointed a “victim counselor” by the local man-hater group.
They eventually made up (since broken up) and everything was dropped. After it happened, I called the local man hater group and asked them why they would represent someone accused of DV against someone who wasn’t. The response was that their representation was not contingent on the criminal system, but they evaluated the cases as they came in.
I asked if the evidence showed that the person who came in was lying, would they drop the case and represent the other party? They said, “Once a client, always a client.” I asked if that was an absolute, and they said “yes.” I asked what would happen if five witnesses said that their client was the abuser and that the other party did nothing wrong. “Once a client, always a client.” I asked if that meant their organization was actually representing some batterers, the very people they were against. She simply repeated, “Once a client, always a client.”
After about 20 minutes of this ping pong game, she actually admitted that she didn’t think that women could be batterers. Even if a woman hit a man it wasn’t the same because of the size differential, and that “she probably had a good reason to do so.”
Oops. Had summary typed. Remembered this was GQ. Draw your own conclusions.
Disagree. Keeping it GQ, it is certainly a punishment. Your girlfriend can live at your house, get an RO against you, and force you out of your own home. She can move her new boyfriend into your home and screw in every room of your house. They can turn the heat up to 90 degrees or the A/C down to 60 degrees, and guess what? You are paying the utility bills by court order!
Meanwhile, you are imposing on friends or family by living with them, or staying at a local cheap motel at your own expense. You have a suitcase full of clothes and toiletries that you were allowed to pack with a police officer standing over your shoulder. Feel like reading a book? Damn, that book is at the house, and her and the new BF are using it to clean the spooge off of the walls.
Were you drinking alcohol when the event in question happened? Welcome to court mandated AA or alcohol assessment! Go in and deny that you have a drinking problem. “All addicts refuse to admit they have a problem! More treatment for you!”
Deny that you battered her? All batterers deny that they are batters! Anger management class for you!
You think that it’s not a punishment or doesn’t make your life hell? Date the wrong woman and report back to me.
No. It’s not criminal law, it’s family law, and it operates on equity principles.
Let me set up a parallel. Twenty years ago you bought your home, which has a big beautiful shady back yard. Three healthy large old trees provide that shade; two are on your property, one on your neighbor’s very near the lot line. That shaded yard was a major selling point for you. To induce you to buy it at a fair price, the previous owners got a letter from old Mr. Miller, who used to own the neighboring property, that guaranteed he wouldn’t remove the tree that provides your shade. You think but don’t know for sure that money changed hands to get that guarantee.
Time passed. Mr. Miller died; Mrs. Miller went into a nursing home, and their kids sold the property to the Funstons – who now want to cut down the tree in order to put in a swimming pool. You brought up Mr. Miller’s guarantee, and they effectively scoffed at it. So your lawyer goes to the judge, arguing that Mr. Miller’s letter grants you an easement to the shade from that tree.
You’re entitled to a temporary injunction, keeping the Funstons from cutting down the tree. Not because you’re right on the merits of the case – that hasn’t been argued out between your lawyers before a judge yet. But because the tree once cut down cannot be restored – so the status quo holds, the tree is left standing, until after the merits of the case are argued and ruled on. Note that the same would be true if it was your neighbors who had the shady yard and you who wanted to cut down the tree and put in the pool.
Likewise, a temporary restraining order doesn’t “convict someone of domestic violence” – it simply says to avoid contact until it’s lifted. It;s an order to one person telling them to refrain from something because another party has complained that he/she was violating the other party’s rights, until the merits of that complaint can be addressed.
The judge does not yet know whether the man is an ogre and the woman rightfully fears for her health and safety, or whether he’s a decent man and she a lying, manipulative bitch. What he does know is that a TRO will keep him from contacting her in either case, protecting her if it is the first and not being needed if it is the second – just as he doesn’t yet know if your claimed easement about the tree or the Funstons’ right to use their own yard as they see fit will turn out to be the case. but stopping them from removing the tree until he can hear the case protects you in the first case and only delays them a bit in the second.
The analogy isn’t perfect – analogies rarely are. But it’s close enough to show how it’s not “automatic conviction.”
The analogy is worse than imperfect - it’s fundamentally flawed in that your example maintains the status quo while a TRO significantly changes it.
If it were truly the case that the TRO did not operate on any presumption of guilt, then the subject wouldn’t be the one ordered out of the home etc. etc.
The fact that this is so is because the petioner is presumed to be the victim and the subject of the TRO is assumed to be a criminal. True, this assumption is only supposed to be in place until the full hearing for a permanent RO, but there’s no doubt that even a TRO is based on this presumption, as above.
I find it hard to believe that a guest could take over your home this way. A wife who has her name on the mortgage, yes, but a girlfriend?
Vindictive women really seem to know how to play the androphobic legal system, and it does hurt people. Its too bad you can’t always tell who is crazy or not.
I find it very easy to believe.
However, I think if that happened, the homeowner could subsequently evict the guest. (Although that might depend on family court rulings.) But in any event, I don’t think the RO process recognizes this.
See: How to Fight a Restraining Order: Do I Need a Restraining Order Lawyer?
Very interesting story and it backs up my claim in my post upthread that I believe that there is a conspiracy at work. The man-hater shelters as you so cleverly called them don’t care one bit about DV. The only agenda they have is to hate men and to do everything they can possibly do to destroy their lives. It doesn’t matter if they have to lie or trash a man’s reputation. The only thing that matters is they are able to put another check matk on an RO.
This whole discussion started when the question was asked can you get a restraining order removed. I think, despite one successful story, it is clear that avoiding and RO or getting one removed does not matter on guilt or innoccence. It matters on the moral character of the woman (in most cases) that took the RO out. If she is willing to continue to lie, all the while encourage and assisted by groups like the above mentioned shelter there isn’t a chance that it willbe removed.
Until the legal system in this country sends a clear message that it will not tolerate perjury and that men have the same rights as women it will never change. In the meantime, women shelters like the one I mentioned i nmy post and the one mentioned above will continue to justify the means while they destroy any good will and sympathy that people have for their work and victims.
Sounds to me you are in the ends justifies the means crowd. You can say I wasn’t “convicted”, but I was not allowed to go to my home, I was not allowed to talk to my children. I watched a man move into my home, live with my children. I saw my bank accounts drained to zero, because this TRO gave her all access and me none. I saw neighbors that I had been friends with for years advert their eyes when they saw me. Because much like the judge that entered the RO, they only heard her side of this twisted story. I have faced the embarassment when for whatever reason a background check has to be run on me, for now I have to once again relive the whole thing and explain it to someone else.
I would argue that a person not “convicted” of a crime by definition is not supposed to suffer the penalties of that crime. A false RO immediately renders the recipent guilty in the eyes of the court and the eyes of the community. And when the RO is dropped because you have spent thousands and thousand of dollars for an attorney to help, where is the DA, the Judge, The Shelter helping you clear your name and procecuting the person who lied to get it?
I will stick by my statement that once an RO is granted it is impossible to get removed unless the person who placed it agrees to drop it. Usually this has to be done in a “deal”. The person who got the RO and her attorney will use it as leverage in a divorce, “you give us this and we will drop the RO”. But ends justify the mean, that gives the few posters in this thread all the divine reason to slander and destroy a man. Disgusting.
Okay, I will leave for lunch with these final thoughts. I would hope that I can get an answer from the few of you here that are defending RO’s no matter what. Keeping in mind the moderators warning on keeping the debate on the OP, here it goes:
I have asked this question before, but no one answered it. It gets right to the heart of the matter and if answered clarifies the true motive of those who want RO’s wether there is proof or not. It should also go along way in answering the OP. It will certainly reveal the mindset of both sides of this argument.
If an RO is placed and there is a justified reason for it, why would the removal be justified? If you did something bad enough to warrant an RO, there should be no reason for it to be removed.
If you have an RO and succesfully make an argument to have it removed, doesn’t it stand to reason that it never should have been granted in the first place? If it is removed, it means that you are not a threat to the person. How can you be a threat this week, but not next? And following “it should have never been granted in the first place”, if it is found that an RO was not needed because the evidence used to get it was a lie (the ONLY way one could get an RO if it wasn’t justified), then shouldn’t that person be charged with perjury and/or slander?
The point I am making is the only people who would deserve the removal of an RO are the ones who should have never recieved on to begin with.
ROs can be abused, but there are a lot of answers to that question. ROs just tell someone to stop what they’re doing. The situation can change or what they’re doing may become moot or be dealt with in other ways.
Here’s a hypothetical. Going through a divorce, one party may show up at the house every day and start an argument over who gets the cat. They may be an MMA fighter and the woman is afraid he may get physical or they may be quadriplegic and unable to harm a fly, but verbal and emotional abuse are covered by domestic violence (domestic violence seems to be what this thread is about). Even if they’re not verbally threatening to kill the person, there is a whole slew of verbal actions that are considered abusive, especially in front of kids. In either case, the female gets an RO to keep that from happening. It may go down as the big bad MMA fighter is a risk of being physically abusive or it may go down as the poor disabled fellow got screwed. Either way, the RO is a warranted domestic violence restraining order. Then, after the stress of the divorce, things usually calm down. Maybe the person who was starting the fight over the cat won it in the divorce and couldn’t be happier so there’s no reason for the RO anymore and it could actually get in the way.
Here’s a recent story about a father unfairly slapped with a restraining order on a web site called Fathers and Families, which advocates for father’s rights.
Writ of Certiorari surely.