From http://overlawyered.com/2005/12/restraining-david-letterman/

[This is from 2005, but I thought it was a very good articulation of the issue of abuse of restraining orders. ]

This case illustrates that judges just rubber-stamp restraining order requests in violation of due process.

Frivolous restraining orders aren’t harmless or meaningless — they have terrible consequences in child custody and other divorce-related litigation brought by the false accuser against the innocent accused.

And loads of restraining orders are based on false allegations.

And legal rights are permanently affected by restraining orders. For example, federal law bans objects of restraining orders from possessing long-held firearms, meaning a falsely accused hunter or security guard has to give up his guns and lose thousands of dollars worth of property.

This patent abuse of process in the Letterman case is typical of how frivolous domestic violence claims are upheld by cowardly judges.

Most judges, desiring to appear sensitive to domestic violence victims, grant more than 99 percent of all temporary restraining orders that are filed. (And it costs nothing to seek a domestic violence TRO, unlike every other kind of civil process, which requires a filing fee).

They’re terrified that in the freak event that they deny a poorly-supported TRO motion, and the defendant then goes nuts in response to the TRO motion and kills the complainant, they’ll be demonized on TV and in the press or even, in rare cases, removed from the bench for “insensitivity.”

Domestic violence TRO’s are granted without any opportunity for the innocent accused to tell his or her side of the story.

Such TRO’s have been called the “poor woman’s divorce” because they enable the wife to summarily kick out her husband and gain control of the house and family car without even going through the procedural safeguards needed for a divorce.

I myself have talked to men who were wheelchair bound or otherwise physically disabled from posing much risk of harm who were falsely accused and then made subject to ex parte domestic violence TROs.

This episode reminds me of Tonya Harding. She was previously convicted of a violent felony for conspiring to attack a figure-skating rival. And she was previously also charged with domestic violence herself.

Yet she managed to get her injured boyfriend arrested for domestic violence after first telling 911 operators falsely that she was beaten by masked intruders and then admitting that story was false and instead changing her story to accuse her boyfriend.

The prosecutors believed her, despite her own conceded initial lie about the very incident question, and history of felonious and domestic violence, and charged the boyfriend despite his denials.

There’s an awful lot of sex bias in handling domestic violence cases, almost always against the male. Women who kill their husbands without provocation get only 7 years, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, compared to 17 years for men who kill their wives.

For evidence of the bias against men, see the statistics cited in the amicus briefs in U.S. v. Morrison, 529 U.S. 598 (2000) filed by the Independent Women’s Forum and Women’s Freedom Network.

(I am a lawyer, but not a divorce lawyer. I should not have to point this out, but since you might otherwise wonder, I have never been accused of domestic violence, nor have I been divorced).

Hans Bader