Legal Victory! Legal precedent for DVRO renewals in CA: Courts must consider abuse/potential for abuse at shared children’s extracurricular activities

Today the CA Third District Court of Appeal (Sacramento) granted our request for publication of an appellate decision that will help domestic violence survivors and their children statewide. Rybolt v. Riley sets legal precedent on 2 important issues concerning Domestic Violence Restraining Orders (DVROs):
1. For the first time ever in a published opinion, the court explains that an abuser can use a child’s extracurricular activities as a way to harass, intimidate, manipulate, or control the other parent, and directed trial courts to take that into consideration when fashioning safe parenting plans and deciding whether to issue or renew a DVRO. In this case, the abusive party repeatedly violated the restraining order’s 25-yard stay-away requirements when attending sports games and other events, causing trauma to both the abuse survivor and the child. These violations led the trial court to renew the survivor’s DVRO, and the appellate court upheld this decision.
2. The opinion also suggests that trial courts should consider the abusive party’s overall career — not just their current or future job opportunities — when deciding whether a DVRO renewal would place a possible “burden” on the restrained party’s employment prospects. In this case, the court found that previous unrelated misconduct the restrained party’s career severely hindered their future job prospects, and determined that a renewed restraining order would be unlikely to create additional barriers that didn’t already exist. This is only the second case since 2004 to discuss the possible burdens that a renewed DVRO could place on the restrained party, providing helpful clarifications that now can be used to support a survivors’ restraining order renewal requests. (The other case, Lister v. Bowen, was also published after a request from FVAP in 2012.)