Impact of New York City Protective Orders on Criminal Cases
Every once in awhile a defendant will violate an order of protection. Even if it is not a threat or an assault that could reasonably be construed as menacing, the fact of the matter is that a full order protection does not just protect a person from menacing communications, it protects them from any communication. The police can arrest that person. The impact of New York City protective orders on criminal cases is that it opens the individual up to a new host of charges and penalties. If you have been arrested for violating a protective order and you want to know how it may affect your case, read on and get in touch with a knowledgeable protective order lawyer today.
How Violating an Order of Protection Can Impact a Case
When it comes to the actual criminal case, the most significant impact of New York City protective orders on criminal cases is that they can become roadblocks if they result in further criminal charges being levied. If a person has an order of protection issued against them and they call the complainant, even to apologize, and the complainant reports that to the police, the police will re-arrest the defendant.
A new case will be instituted against them for violating the order of protection, and the defendant will be charged with criminal contempt, meaning they willfully violated a court order. The criminal contempt case will be a separate but parallel case to the underlying case which resulted in the order of protection, to begin with.
Creation of a New Case
In terms of any sort of plea bargaining or negotiating between the prosecutor and the defense attorney, now there are two cases. If the prosecutor leverages it, it significantly reduces the defense attorney’s ability to argue that the defendant is a law-abiding citizen who would never do something like this.
Depending on what the underlying crime was and how the prosecutor wants to charge the violation of the order of protection, the new case, which for all intentional purposes could be nothing more than a phone call, could be a more serious case in terms of offense level than the underlying case.
How Protective Orders Impact the Prosecution’s Argument
Another impact of New York City protective orders on criminal cases is that the order and violation of an order can give a prosecutor ammunition in their argument. The prosecutor will argue that the defendant violated the order which means that they are capable of violating other laws. It makes it much more difficult to favorably resolve cases when an order of protection is violated.
Most defendants are good about not violating the order and making sure that they are able to stay away from places that they know the complainant is going to be. They do not have their friends call and they do not post passive-aggressive messages on the other person’s social media.
Since the crime is not specifically against the complainant in the case, it is violating an order instead of making an illegal phone call, the crime is against the court. Judges tend to not be pleased when they have specifically told somebody that they have to do something and that person immediately disregards that and does what they want to do anyway. They tend to take it personally when their orders are disregarded, so it can become problematic to a criminal case to have a violation of an order of protection tacked on it.
Value of an Attorney
The impact of New York City protective orders on criminal cases cannot be emphasized enough. The violation of a protective order can reflect poorly on you, giving the prosecution ammunition to use against you in your current case, while simultaneously opening up a second case against you. While this might seem overwhelming, a capable attorney can attempt to build a solid defense for you, and mitigate the severity of the potential penalties you face.