Lawyers Manual - Unified Court System

206 Elizabeth Cronin
Moreover, victims faced a real risk of retaliation by offenders for leaving the
relationship, especially if the offender was arrested or if there were children.
Victims were rightly concerned that the orders of protection they were offered
were nothing more than pieces of paper.
Each year more than 1700 women are murdered by their partners. 2 The
American Medical Association estimates that up to four million women per year
are battered by their husbands or partners. 3 These figures are both staggering
and numbing. Traditionally, police responded by making an arrest only as a last
resort; they preferred to allow the individuals to work it out with or without social
service intervention. 4 Even the American Bar Association had recommended that
police attempt to quell domestic disputes without resorting to arrest. 5 Victims were
not encouraged or even allowed to pursue criminal charges against their abusers.
Those who did often faced a hostile system filled with untrained professionals.
Police, medical responders, prosecutors and judges were often uneducated in the
social and psychological dynamics of abuse and grew easily frustrated at victims
who were uncertain about pursuing charges after arrest.
As a deputy bureau chief of the Domestic Violence Bureau in the Westchester
County District Attorney’s Office, I saw innumerable cases of women who
changed their minds after arrest and did everything they could to thwart
prosecution efforts to convict the offender. The reasons were varied. Some had
real financial concerns, others were afraid for their safety and that of their
children. Many were so entrenched in the cycle of violence that they went back
out of habit. Even women who had orders of protection issued would take the
men back once the offenders apologized and promised never to hurt them again;
they would act out of pity, guilt, lingering affection or misplaced hope. Many
victims expressed the belief that even with a successful prosecution, nothing
would change, and, when he got out of jail, he would come back to get her.
Consequently, there seemed to be light at the end of the tunnel when, in
1994, Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), 6 which
allocated $1.6 billion to fight violence against women by, among other things,
providing funds to educate police, prosecutors and judges, supporting battered
women’s shelters and, perhaps most critically, mandating arrests for domestic
violence crimes. That same year, the New York State Legislature passed the
Family Protection and Domestic Violence Intervention Act of 1994, which
amended Criminal Procedure Law § 140.10 to include mandatory arrests for
particular domestic violence crimes. 7 The mandatory arrest policy was unique:
for all other crimes in the State of New York, police officers “may” arrest a
person, but the new statute obligated the officer to make the arrest. 8 Now,