Family Violence Appellate Project
Giving survivors a second chance at justice
October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and we’ll be doing our part to raise awareness by sharing resources for survivors and those who support them on our social media channels. On Wednesdays, we’ll be featuring resources that are most accessed through our Legal Resource Library. Make sure you’re following us on our channels and please share our posts and tweets to help us raise awareness this month!
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Today we did a training with National Housing Law Project on the protections survivors have under Assembly Bill 2413, which offers housing protections for survivors and others who need to call 911 to summon police or emergency assistance.
Stay tuned for a video of the training, which will be added to our Legal Resource Library soon.
To learn more about the other work we’re doing to help survivors stay safe in their homes, visiting our Housing & Employment Justice Project webpage.
We’re out of moot court and on to oral argument today! We will be arguing as amicus (friend-of-the-court) in the second district on the issue of how to resolve the conflict in the law between a party’s right to attend a civil deposition and the right of a person protected by a restraining order to be protected by the terms of that restraining order.
We’ll be in oral argument today at 12:45 pm in Los Angeles! This case deals with language access and victim-blaming, two issues that, unfortunately, have resulted in survivors not getting a fair ruling in court.
We are glad to be participating in National Network to End Domestic Violence‘s Domestic Violence Counts Annual Census today. For a 24-hour period, we will be counting the number of requests for services from survivors of domestic violence that we receive to determine how many survivors rely on domestic violence agencies nationwide on a given day, and for what reasons.
FVAP legal victory! California has strong laws that recognize that parents who commit domestic violence are often not able to safely parent without taking steps like successfully completing a batterer’s intervention program, undergoing necessary drug and alcohol abuse counseling, taking parenting classes to make sure they are able to put their children first, and not using custody and visitation to commit further abuse.
In this case, the Court of Appeal ruled that the trial court had awarded an abusive parent substantial visitation time that amounted to custody without applying section 3044 of the Family Code, which must first be applied to determine whether it is in the best interest of the child to award any custody, or substantial visitation amounting to custody, to a parent who has been found to have committed domestic violence.
Huge thanks to our co-counsel at Central California Legal Services, Inc., and Haynes and Boone, LLP! Also to California Women’s Law Center and Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP who filed an amicus (friend-of-the-court) brief.
