This report focuses on the well-being of children living with domestic violence and how it is impacted by decisions judges make in final protective orders and conclude that Maryland’s Best interests of the Child standard is not being met consistently in protective orders issued by Montgomery County’s Circuit Court. Our findings indicate judges rarely order remedies available to protect children such as Emergency Family maintenance; nor do judges often take advantage of services available in the County that can provide long term benefit to families touched by domestic violence, such as ordering abusers to offender counseling and ordering children to Safe Start Child counseling. More important, judges are often forced to fashion visitation arrangements that risk further traumatizing children, impacting both their safety and that of the custodial parent, either ordering ex-partners to exchange children in unsafe environments or ordering family members or friends of the parties to act as visitation supervisors, though they may lack guidelines for how to handle this fraught situation as well as a full awareness of the children’s best interests. We urge County leaders to consider better alternatives to these arrangements: 1) affordable child transfer services and monitored supervised visitation services where children’s interactions with the abusive divorced/separated parent can be safely supervised by a trained individual.

This report is Court Watch’s first look at the protective order process in Montgomery County’s Circuit Court. In it we analyze data collected over a year long period from September 2012 to September of 2013. As with our reports on District Court practice, we focus on court processes relating to the short and long term safety of victims and the effectiveness of orders, relying on nationally acknowledged best practices. While we found Circuit Judges were overall polite to both parties, many of the national and state best practice standards widely shared by us since our first report in 2011 have not been put into common practice in our County’s higher court. Staggered exits, in particular, were properly executed in 65% of cases, but in 35% of cases were either not used or used incorrectly. Almost half of judges failed to remind respondents it was a crime to violate a protective order while a majority of the time judges did not tell respondents they must surrender firearms owned or in their possession. As judicial introductions varied widely in the amount of information offered, we recommend that the Circuit Court play an audiotape like the one now in use in the County’s District Courts before the docket begins. As the Circuit court hears most protective orders involving children, in our next report we will address issues that arise when visitation and custody matters must be decided by Circuit Court judges.

In this follow-up report, Court Watch documents 510 hearings and measures changes in the most critical areas outlined in our first report of October 2011. Notably, in areas of court process and procedure, there have been significant improvements, including a sharp increase in use of staggered exits and the introduction of an English/Spanish audio explaining how a hearing will work. Judicial demeanor has also greatly improved, with fewer incidents of disrespect. However, individual judges varied widely in their use of warnings to individual respondents about criminal penalties for violations and firearms possession, as they did in questioning petitioners asking to dismiss their cases about their safety. The result was an overall negligible change in the numbers documenting use of these best practices in our first report. Our data also raised additional concerns. Of the 510 cases we heard, there were 380 where children were involved, highlighting the dangers to children of witnessing domestic violence and the need for courts to notify petitioners of off-site resources such as The Family Justice Center and the Safe Start counseling program for children.

In this report, Court Watch’s first, we examine data collected by our volunteer monitors in District Court protective and peace order hearings between January and July of 2011. While we document the behavior of judges and court employees and are concerned by the rudeness and dismissiveness of a small number of judges and bailiffs, that is not the bulk of this report. Using the nationally recognized "Guide to Improving Practice" as our reference, we identify several fundamental best practices that impact the short and long-term safety of victims and the likelihood of their returning to court and assess how often judges utilize them.