Court denies relief from abusive quasi-criminal proceedings

We were disappointed to see that the U.S. Supreme Court, after accepting certiorari in Robertson v. U.S. ex rel Watson, belatedly changed its mind and denied cert as "improvidently granted." Justice Roberts authored a stinging dissent, arguing that the court should have re-emphasized that the power to bring criminal proceedings belongs exclusively to the sovereign, and should not be wielded by private parties.

This cert denial allows the Court of Appeals and trial court rulings to stand. Those rulings had allowed the former girlfriend to sue her former boyfriend in criminal contempt, thereby adding three consecutive 180 day jail stays on top of an existing multi-year sentence - even though a duly-empowered prosecutor for the state agreed that no charges would be brought as part of a plea bargain in a subsequent case.

This dangerous ruling allows to continue the dangerous trend of mixing civil and criminal remedies together, under the umbrella justification of addressing "domestic violence". This author believes the laws empowering civil courts to impose criminal sanctions is not only dangerous, but a breach of our fundamental constitutional rights to confront our accusers and receive a fair and impartial trial, and the rights against double jeopardy.

Too many states now rely upon the federal dollars attached to so-called domestic violence cases. Too many prosecutors are being constrained from making common-sense decisions. The lure of federal funding for such cases, in a time of tight state budgets, creates near-irresistable pressure to take domestic violence cases to the mat, wastes important state resource, and causes defendants in domestic violence cases to be singled out for harsher treatment merely because the actions arose between individuals who had been living in the same house.

Most troubling is the Court's apparent sanction of legislative efforts to strike at some of the most fundamental rights we have to protection against abusive government action. We can only hope that the Court will readdress this issue in the near future, and provide a curb against the tide of abusive prosecutions that is occuring under the banner of "domestic violence".