By Lisa Manning, Indiana Office of Court Services Early this year, the founder of Miss Transgender America, Christa Leigh Steele-Knudslien, was found dead in her home after being stabbed and beaten to death by her husband. In an interview with police, Mark Steele-Knudslien said he “snapped” after arguing with his wife. Intimate partner violence is […]
Family Violence
How do you define success?
Is it running an efficient court—the volume of cases you’ve cleared each quarter? Or do you look at recidivism by individual defendants, or maybe the number of return trips to court by parties in a contested dissolution case? In fact, studies dating back to the 1980s have consistently shown that what matters most to parties […]
Lethality Assessments
Do Courts Use Them in Domestic Violence Cases? PART TWO The more experience we have, the more comfortable we are relying on our “gut instincts” about people and their behavior. But when it comes to adjudicating cases, our system of jurisprudence does not condone gut feelings as a basis for judicial decisions. As discussed in […]
Lethality Assessments: What are they? Do they work?
PART ONE Most Indiana judges know that our court system uses risk assessments to evaluate juvenile and adult offenders and to enable probation and pretrial release officers to recommend conditions of release. Judges might assume that a lethality assessment is just another term for a risk assessment. However, the two instruments differ, and they are […]
Are you asking the right questions? Intimate Partner Violence and Pet Abuse
In civil protection order cases or criminal family violence cases, judges and court staff naturally focus on determining appropriate remedies and consequences for the humans involved. They are always the named parties, victims, witnesses, or protected persons. However, it is likely that if the family home is violent, and if companion animals live in that […]
Are ACEs in your Courtroom?
Adults have one thing in common: we were once children. The quality of one’s childhood may have been tumultuous, nurturing, or a little of both. Certain events from childhood can stay with a person, sometimes long into adulthood. There is a scientifically documented relationship between events occurring in one’s childhood and an adult’s health and […]
Trauma and the Courts – Being an Informed Court
The Issue Unless they are there for a wedding or an adoption, people rarely come to court for a happy, positive reason. Judges who handle criminal cases involving allegations of spousal or child abuse, sexual assault, or other violent crimes can count on seeing people who have experienced at least one traumatic event in their […]
National Domestic Violence Hotline
What is 20 years old, confidential, never stops working, and saves countless lives? The National Domestic Violence Hotline Established as part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (Pub. L. 103-322), the Hotline originated from the Violence Against Women Act, which authorized the Secretary of Health and Human Services to award […]
NICS: National Instant Background Check System
The Power of the Pen: What happens behind the scenes Judges wield tremendous power, often literally with a stroke of their pens as they sign their names on orders and findings. When the cases involve family violence, routine decisions—whether to check the “Brady box” on a protection order, or whether to make the domestic violence […]
The Dropout Problem: Part 2
What is behind it and what judges can do about it In Part 1 of this article in the September/October issue of Court Times, we considered research on the high victim attrition rate in criminal domestic violence cases, as well as some laws that judges can use to help ensure the integrity of the proceedings. […]
