Domestic violence is any type of violence between people that are in a dating relationship or in a marriage or a family relationship. There’s still a mistake in perception that if someone says, “I don’t want to press charges,” that the charges are going to get dropped. That used to be how it was a long time ago, but not anymore.
A lot of times, they’ll start with a $50,000 bond if the person hasn’t been arrested, and tell us that they charged us a high bond, which is sometimes higher than what they charge for a murder case. What we have to do is go in and ask the judge, ask the DA, bring the client in to get the bond reduced to a reasonable bond so the person isn’t sitting in jail for a week.
Someone charged with domestic violence can be looking up to a year in jail, up to a $4,000 fine. They can also lose their rights to own farms. There is a lot of ways to defend on a soft family violence case. Usually, the case is one-sided. It’s almost always from the side of the person that called the police.
Our job is to talk to our client, try to get the whole story, try to get both sides of the story and compare it. And compare it against the evidence that the police did that night, which is also usually one sided.
