Common Defenses in Domestic Violence Cases
There are all sorts of different defenses that can be utilized in a domestic violence case. Normally, they are driven by the facts of the particular case. In other words, what happened? If somebody attacks you and as you're defending yourself, that person gets hurt, that could certainly be a defense to any injuries that the person had.
Of course, if someone attacks you, you have to act reasonably in defending yourself, and that's usually where the problem comes in in a domestic violence case.
For example, a wife tries to hit a husband. The husband blocks the hit and then punches the wife in the face. The argument from the prosecutor's standpoint will be that too much force was used.
And, of course, when the wife talks to the police, she's usually very angry when she talks to them and will tell a story that will not be helpful to you. Unfortunately, prosecutors tend to believe the first story that the alleged victim told in a domestic violence case versus the one that is said after the person is arrested.
They will have to post a $50,000 bond and are looking at spending jail time and having a criminal record and a host of other ramifications. If that person is the breadwinner, we often see the spouse wanting to change their story and try to help the person, but usually, from a prosecutor's standpoint, that's simply too late.
They figure the person is trying to help the other, but they don't care. They're going to look back at the original statement, but that original statement is not always the complete truth. A lot of times, it's embellished, and I've even seen where it's just been an outright lie.
In one case, a girlfriend was trying to gain an advantage in child custody. First, she fought with the person intentionally as a strategy, and then she lied about what happened.
That case ended up getting dismissed by the prosecutors once everything came out, but to get everything out took a lot of hard work, and we had to go to the doorstep of trial before they dismissed the case once they saw they were going to be in a real bad position moving forward with it.
Prefiling Intervention in Domestic Violence Cases
Certainly, if someone attacks you, your defense is that you were defending yourself from the attack, and if that person got hurt, that's their fault. I had another case where a person was attacked by his live-in girlfriend, and then he tried to leave, and she was blocking his way, and he moved her out of the way.
She ended up tripping and hitting a mirror and cutting her face. Of course, the police arrived after the neighbors called because they had heard the upstairs commotion. My client was arrested on a $100,000 bond and charged not only with domestic violence but also great bodily injury because of the cut across the face.
We ended up sending a bunch of information in pre-filing, and the prosecutors, after they saw all of the facts related to the case, realized that they were going to lose the case. My client really shouldn't have been arrested, so they decided not to file the case and rejected it.
There are a bunch of defenses that can be used, but of course, they're going to have to be relevant to the case, and not every defense applies to every single case. It depends on what happened and what evidence the police have.
Don't forget, the police are coming in with their bodycams turned on, so you're going to have a tough time mounting a defense if, on the bodycam, you, as a defendant, admit that you punched your wife because she wouldn't be quiet, for example. You're not going to get a defense in that case because they've got you on bodycam admitting that you committed the crime that you're charged with.
So, if you have a situation where you're looking for a defense to a domestic violence case—you're looking to figure out what you're going to do—pick up the phone and make the call. I've been doing it for 25 years. I know I can help you.
