Factors Related to Domestic Violence Court Dispositions in a Large Urban Area: The Role of Victim/Witness Reluctance and Other Variables. Executive Summary

摘要

To date, little research effort has been committed to examining the court processing of domestic violence cases. Indeed, most of the research on the systemic processing of domestic violence focuses on the deterrent effects of arrest (i.e., the Minneapolis Experiment and its numerous replications). This policing research, which originally called for arresting batterers, combined with the second wave of the women's movement and a number of court cases where battered women successfully sued police departments, resulted in a significant increase in the number of persons arrested for domestic violence in the U.S. This increase in arrests resulted in an unprecedented increase in domestic violence cases reaching the courts. Thus, it is particularly important to broaden the domestic violence research focus to include how the courts process these cases. This study, conducted in a large Midwestern jurisdiction, used four sources of data to explore how misdemeanor intimate partner domestic violence cases are processed. The first data set included pretrial, prosecutor, and police data collected on 2,670 court cases. These data were analyzed to determine the frequency with which various phenomena occurred, and to examine which variables were related to the case outcomes, in particular the court verdict. The second data set involved in-depth interviews with and surveys of the 14 judges, 18 prosecutors, and 31 public defenders who try misdemeanor domestic violence cases in the jurisdiction. The third data set comprised 127 court transcripts from this Midwestern jurisdiction. These transcripts were carefully analyzed using content analysis. The final, and probably most important portion of the data, was in-depth interviews with and surveys of over 100 women victims who were involved in these cases.