How Judges Can Punish Suspected Victims

Domestic violence is real and happens to men more frequently than many admit. In fact the shelter movement most often denies that men are victims of female violence. I have heard some people ask "What did he do to her to make her violent and abusive?" The answer is that he does not have to do anything to her. The current trend is to accept female accusations of domestic assault as true without looking at the evidence.

Crass TV talk shows titillate viewers with a distorted picture of the world. On a daily basis they supply a parade of misfits, deviants, and louts for commercial profit and the consumption of their audiences. These shows provide women the experiences of others that enable them to contrive a believable but false accusations. An abusive woman lies out of the desire to harm and control others, often for monetary gain and her compulsion for destructiveness.

Sometimes, persons who deny their violence are guilty. In other instances, persons who deny are innocent and many people see this denial as evidence of guilt. Without looking further, persons who pretend that they have expert knowledge clothe their opinions in psycho-babble. When a wife supports her husband's innocence, she is accommodating his denial. When children support their father's innocence, they are accommodating his denial. These individuals say that those who support another's innocence are guilty of 'accommodation' and must be cleansed through 'therapy' and 'reeducation'.

The infamous judicial and clerical inquisitions of the Middle Ages and Renaissance eras arose from a preoccupation with confession, contrition and victimization. These inquisitions relied on suspicions that often lead to imprisonment, torture, and murder of innocent people. Now then, if someone suspects that a person is a victim of domestic abuse and that person refuses to testify, the California Code of Civil Procedure, Section 1219 provides,

" (a) Except as provided in subdivisions (b) and (c), when the contempt consists of the omission to perform an act which is yet in the power of the person to perform, he or she may be imprisoned until he or she has performed it, and in that case the act shall be specified in the warrant of commitment.

(b) Notwithstanding any other law, no court may imprison or otherwise confine or place in custody the victim of a sexual assault for contempt when the contempt consists of refusing to testify concerning that sexual assault.

(c) In a finding of contempt for a victim of domestic violence who refuses to testify, the court shall not incarcerate the victim, but may require the victim to attend up to 72 hours of a domestic violence program for victims or require the victim to perform up to 72 hours of appropriate community service, provided that in a subsequent finding of contempt for refusing to testify arising out of the same case, the court shall have the option of incarceration pursuant to subdivision (a)."

Refusal to testify can include a person's refusal to acknowledge that he or she is a victim. Under Section 1219, a judge can repetitively commit a person to brainwashing, indoctrination, community service, or incarceration for their refusal to lie.

A variation of this coercive notion is the must arrest policy. One example appeared in the California Law Review, Domestic Violence as a Crime Against the State: The Need for Mandatory Arrest in California. Variations of this advocacy appeared in many publications and lead to the phenomena of dual arrests. As a result, many jurisdictions now discourage dual arrests and have adopted the policy that the unsupported word of an accuser is sufficient to arrest another [Massachusetts Domestic Violence Law Enforcement Guidelines 1997 (Revised) - and others] with complete civil and criminal immunity.

The accuser does not have to be a spiteful spouse or the purported victim. The accuser can be a malicious neighbor and the must arrest policy, requires that police officers arrest and jail the accused rather than seeking the truth. If the accused is the principal source of income, the must arrest policy subjects the family and the accused to economic blockade.

Both men and women report painless spontaneous bruising and nose bleeds sometime in their lives. Yet, this common and innocent phenomena can be taken as proof of battery by another.

The problem is, judges and prosecutors adopt preconceived notions without accountability for their own actions. These individuals refuse to believe the principals and eyewitnesses who factually refute those notions. The goal of too many of these individuals is to convict without seeking the truth. I have demonstrated this in my accounts of false rape allegations and junk justice.

The family can suffer breakup, emotional and physical distress, and outrageous financial losses. Think about the therapist fees, attorney fees, court costs, jail fees, taxes and penalties, loss of employment and wages, and cost of court appointed foster care for the children that the family faces. The irony is that an innocent family can suffer through mere suspicion of battery. All of this in search of a victim that never existed.