If my defense of the legal system wasn’t a clue, I am an attorney who has practiced criminal defense and domestic relations law for over 20 years. Everyone here wants to be black and white, but that frankly, is not the real world. It is much more complicated than that, which is why I have such an issue with red lines and rushes to judgment. I will also tell you that I was raised and lived old school. I have never and will never hit a woman, not even in self defense. And let me tell you, I don’t care how justified it can be, you hit your wife, guess who goes to jail? One of my major weaknesses in my practice is falling for victims of domestic abuse. I have lost more money over the years than I can imagine because I have a particular distaste for abusers and tend to melt when these women tell me their story and ask for help. They are usuallly in a situation where they have little or no money and are trying to survive. Thus, I end up working for free.
Having said that, false accusation happen and much more often than many people realize. When it does, it is devastating. I love women and tend to put them on a pedestal, but they can be just as mean, manipulative, and dishonest as men. In particular, I am no longer even phased by the lengths that some women can go in making false accusations in order to get the upper hand in child custody cases.
In domestic assault cases, I tend to like to figure out the pattern over time, rather than judge a one time incident. The vast majority of domestic assault cases that I have defended come at the time of a seriously failing relationship. It is a time of great stress and people lose their filters. What I see happen is that buttons start getting pushed and a man gets to his breaking point and hits his wife. Momma calls the cops, dad goes to jail, they get divorced and there’s not an ongoing problem. It was the relationship, not necessarily the normal character of the man that causes the problem. Should he have walked away? Yep, but some times people in that situation screw up. It is also much easier for her to call law enforcement and go through with a prosecution because she hasn’t actually been a victim of ongoing, deeply entrenched systematic control, which is my definition of real domestic abuse.
Dang, just looked at the clock. I hope my statements are not misconstrued, it’s just that these situations are not always as good vs evil as people think they are.
