Gitmo at Home: DV Courts in America

October 19, 2007 | Filed Under David Heleniak, Democrats/Leftists, News, Publius Contributor, Society/Culture, Uncategorized | No Comments

-By David Heleniak

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Domestic violence is a very real and significant problem in America. This month would be a good time to address the attempt of state governments to combat domestic violence through the issuance of temporary and permanent restraining orders.

In the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center and our nation’s response to terrorism domestically and abroad, there has been a flurry of negative reaction in the press to the subjecting of suspected terrorists to trial by military tribunal without the constitutional protections afforded other criminals. As John F. Kearney, III, put it in the March 24, 2003 issue of the New Jersey Lawyer, “All of us want as much done by government as possible to protect us from more Sept. 11 attacks or worse. None of us wants to be nuked, poisoned or fall victim to a suicide bomber. But none of us should want, either, to give away our hard-won liberties.” While the legitimacy of using military tribunals to try accused terrorists is getting well-deserved attention, the media has been largely silent on a related topic, the legitimacy of trying defendants accused of a crime, domestic violence, in brief restraining order hearings in the family court, where defendants are denied virtually all of the due process protections afforded defendants in the criminal court. These systems have been in effect much longer than the anti-terrorism measures, and affect many more people, yet one hears very little about them.
Read more

Nifong and HRES 590

October 8, 2007 | Filed Under Congress, David Heleniak, Democrats/Leftists, Media Bias, Publius Contributor, Society/Culture, The Law, Uncategorized | No Comments

-By David Heleniak

The Nifonging of the three lacrosse players from Duke University did not rise out of a vacuum. Rather, it was the product of two systemic problems in America, the tendency amongst many prosecutors and judges to replace the concern for justice with the concern for self-promotion and career advancement, and, in cases of certain politically charged crimes, anti-male bias.
Illustrative of the bias, on September 25, 2007, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution on domestic violence, HRES 590, that stereotypes men as wife-beaters. A thorough analysis of the resolution by RADAR (Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting) found that 18 of its 23 statements are either misleading or simply wrong (http://www.mediaradar.org/docs/RADARanalysis-HRES590.pdf). Two in particular unfairly smear fathers:

  • “Whereas 40 to 60 percent of men who abuse women also abuse children.”
  • “Whereas according to one study, during court ordered visitation, five percent of abusive fathers threaten to kill their spouses, 34 percent of abusive fathers threaten to kidnap their children, and 25 percent of abusive fathers threaten to physically hurt their children.”

With the passage of HRES 590, savvy prosecutors and judges will clearly perceive the political winds as blowing against men, as they have been for some time.
Read more

PC Feminism and the DV Courts

August 23, 2007 | Filed Under David Heleniak, Democrats/Leftists, Media Bias, Publius Contributor, Society/Culture, Uncategorized | No Comments

-By David Heleniak

Political correctness is not, as many believe, the act of being non-offensive. It is, rather, an ideology resulting from the transformation of the Marxist concept of class oppression. Orthodox Marxism teaches that the world is made up of two economic classes, the capitalist class and the working class, and that the capitalist class oppresses the working class. The rich get richer while the poor get poorer.

When the orthodox Marxist theory of class oppression was shown to be a dead end, some leftist intellectuals turned their attention from economic classes to social classes. It’s not capitalists oppressing workers, they determined, it’s dominant social groups oppressing non-dominant groups, as in whites oppressing blacks, heterosexuals oppressing homosexuals, Christians oppressing non-Christians, and men oppressing women. Of the various branches of political correctness, PC feminism has arguably been the most successful.

PC feminism is not your mother’s feminism. As Cathy Young states in her book Ceasefire: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality, we owe a lot to the feminists of the past. “They deserve credit for helping break down the barriers of discrimination in the public arena; for making gender neutrality an accepted legal principle; for challenging stereotypes about women’s nature. Thanks to them, achievement and ambition are no longer considered unfeminine and women are expected to make something of themselves, not just marry. Thanks to them, most of us believe that both parents can nurture young children.” Thanks to PC feminists, in contrast, we have the theory of the patriarchy and the PC conception of domestic violence (DV), two ideas that are responsible for widespread violations of the civil rights of men and pervasive damage to father-child relationships.
Read more

Manhattan Prosecutors Declare War on Families

March 2, 2007 | Filed Under David Heleniak, Democrats/Leftists, Family, Publius Contributor, Society/Culture, The Law, Uncategorized | No Comments

-By David Heleniak

2006 saw a refreshing increase in the number of commentary pieces tackling the problems with state domestic violence (DV) restraining order systems. Most if not all of these articles focus on civil DV restraining orders. In the October 2006 issue of The Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk exposes a disturbing development that had not been commented upon before. In her eye-opening article “Criminal Law Comes Home,” Suk examines a practice in Manhattan that has become routine in criminal cases involving DV, the imposition of de facto divorces in which the government “initiates and dictates the end of … intimate relationship[s]” by subjecting “the practical and substantive continuation of the relationship[s] to criminal sanction” (10).

The path to de facto divorce begins when a man is arrested for domestic violence. “The arrest may have come at the behest of neighbors rather than the victim herself. Or the victim may have called the police to seek specific intervention in that moment” (59). Whatever led to the arrest, with it, the alleged victim’s marriage to the defendant is very likely over, whether she likes it or not.

In Manhattan, “a leading jurisdiction … considered to be ‘in the forefront of efforts to combat domestic violence,’” domestic violence is defined by the D.A.’s Office as “‘any crime or violation committed by a defendant against … a member of his or her same family or household’” (42). A vast majority of these cases do not involve serious physical injury, and many of the cases charged do not allege any physical injury. But “[e]ven as the ‘violence’ of DV has been defined down,” to the point where harassment is considered violent, these cases “trigger application of a ‘mandatory domestic violence protocol’ different from other crimes” (44). As Suk explains, “[t]he uniform application of a mandatory protocol in every case represents the prosecutorial response to a paradigm story in which DV victims can turn into murder victims overnight. In the oral culture of a prosecutor’s office, a misdemeanor DV defendant has the potential to turn out to be an O.J. Simpson” (44). Indeed, “[r]ookie prosecutors are warned that their DV misdemeanors are the cases that could get their names in the newspaper for failure to prevent something serious” (44-45). In this culture of fear, “every case is treated as a potential prelude to murder” (44). This is despite the fact that “[p]rosecutors generally expect that DV victims will be unwilling to cooperate in prosecution” (46), a fact that speaks volumes about the level of the crimes being charged and the victims’ own take on the likelihood of serious crimes being committed in the future.
Read more

Tags: ,

Help the Soldiers!

CLC 2007
Blogroll




Enter your Email


Preview | Powered by FeedBlitz

Featured Sites



Contact Us

Archives






American Conservatives
Blog Roll

Image hosting by Photobucket

Reject the UN
Blog Roll

Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting
Clicky Web Analytics