No, no. Not the various and sundry electoral issues. After all, those are now officially moot.
As noted by the director of Cleveland's Domestic Violence Center, these could fall in a category called Laws of Unintended Consequences.
Ohio's new constitutional amendment aimed at denying special legal rights to gay and unmarried couples also may strip legal protections from thousands of unwed victims of domestic violence.
Legal and victim-advocacy circles are buzzing over motions from the Cuyahoga County public defender's office to dismiss domestic-violence charges against unmarried defendants. The argument: that the charge violates the amendment to Ohio's Constitution known as Issue 1 by giving spouselike status and protection to victims who live with, but aren't married to, their accused attackers.
"The thing is, you can only get a domestic-violence charge now if you are a wife beater, not a girlfriend beater," said Jeff Lazarus, a law clerk for public defender Robert Tobik and chief architect of the motions to dismiss.
Issue 1 became law on Dec. 1, and none of the cases in Cleveland Municipal and Cuyahoga County Common Pleas courts has produced a judge's ruling yet. But the filings have stunned domestic-violence victims advocates, who expect that the office's novel tactic will start an avalanche of copycat pleadings across the state.
"It's a bad, bad thing," said Cathleen Alexander, director of the Domestic Violence Center in Cleveland. "We're very worried that some victims will not be granted the protection they need because they're not married. That could jeopardize people's lives. "I think," she added, "that this is consistent with the law of unintended consequences."
Yet the public defender's tactic gives hope for opponents of Issue 1, which Ohio voters approved in November. Some lawyers who oppose the amendment say if a judge sides with the public defender's reasoning, the court could declare the amendment a violation of the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law. Specifically, a married victim of domestic violence would have more protection than an unmarried neighbor beaten by a live-in lover, and married and unmarried defendants would be treated differently as well.
It will be interesting to see what happens with this. My suspicion is that (1) a judge will state that clealy, undermining the domestic violence law was not the intent or design of the legislators; (2) the Ohio legislature, somewhat peeved by all this, will pass a law either specifically noting that Issue 1 was not meant to amend the Domestic Violence laws. Either way, Issue 1 is likely to survive all this -- somewhat dented, to be sure, but essentially intact.
Posted by iain at January 18, 2005 02:03 PM
