Bucks County domestic abuse victims will get more time to submit necessary legal paperwork for a temporary restraining order under a recently approved court policy change that followed a 10-year high in emergency protection from abuse requests.
The change is the second time in a little more than a year that Bucks courts have adjusted policies involving domestic abuse victims’ access to legal protections under the state’s Protection from Abuse Act.
The latest policy change took effect Dec. 13, two months after this news organization began looking into the sharp rise in emergency PFA requests in 2016. The change added 75 minutes — from 11:45 a.m. to 1 p.m. — to the deadline for applicants to request the broader temporary orders on weekdays. It also pushed back the hearing start time for those petitions to 1:30 p.m. instead of noon.
The revised policy includes another new step to ensure abuse victims are not left in limbo — a provision that specifically requires court administration to assist an applicant in going to an available district judge to have an emergency petition heard.
“Obviously, it’s a good change,” said Dabney Miller, associate director and in-house social worker with The Women’s Law Project in Philadelphia. “That is tremendous improvement and more responsive to the needs of the residents of Bucks County that need the protection of the law.”
Temporary and emergency PFAs are used by individuals who believe they are in imminent danger from domestic violence. In Bucks County, district courts are authorized to hear emergency PFA petitions after 4 p.m Monday through Thursday and after noon on Fridays, as well as weekends and holidays.
An emergency order expires the next day, while a temporary order remains active until a hearing on a permanent order is held, typically within 10 days. A temporary PFA also can include additional conditions such as requiring a defendant to surrender firearms and other conditions.
The increase in emergency PFA requests — 34 in 2016 compared to nine in 2015 — coincided with an August 2016 update in county policy that authorized local district courts to be available nine more hours a week to hear those requests. The jump led some legal and victim advocates to question whether the spike was a sign that applicants used the emergency PFA option because they had trouble obtaining same-day temporary orders through the County Common Pleas court after noon.
County PFA data for 2016 and the first 11 months of 2017 showed that 418 of the 1,248 PFA requests filed — 34 percent — were timestamped after 11:45 a.m. It’s unknown how many temporary restraining orders were requests, but last year roughly three-quarters of 664 Bucks County petitioners sought one, according to the data.
Bucks County Court Administrator Stephen Heckman cited “prior misunderstandings” as prompting the revised policy, and insisted the former policy did not create potential time gaps when neither a Common Pleas or district judge was available to hear PFA petitioners seeking temporary restraining orders. Bucks County Court of Common Pleas has 13 elected and four senior judges.
“That was never true,” Heckman said in an email response.
Heckman added the change to a 1:30 p.m. hearing time weekdays was done to “further accommodate the interests of the petitioners” and domestic violence victim legal advocates.
“We simply extended the time to try to accommodate more petitioners with (completed) petitions before the hearing judge assigned that day,” Heckman said.
“Extraordinarily burdensome”
The earlier filing deadline posed a hardship for many applicants, according to legal advocates like Carol Gaughan, legal advocacy manager for A Woman’s Place, Bucks County’s domestic violence service provider.
According to Gaughan, victim and legal advocates had made previous unsuccessful requests for a second PFA hearing slot. The applicationprocess can take up to two hours to complete if the paperwork is not done ahead of an applicant’s arrival at the Bucks County Justice Center in Doylestown Borough. It meant that abuse victims had to arrive before 9:30 a.m. under the previous deadlines, she added.
Abuse victims often encounter barriers when seeking a PFA, said Susan Higginbotham, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Hourly wage earners and women with child care and transportation difficulties face the greatest challenges and risk of discouragement, according to Higginbotham and other advocates.
“It is extraordinarily burdensome for someone in crisis, who is trying to hold onto a job, and has to make child care arrangements,” Miller, of The Women’s Law Project, said. “What if they have a job and they work shift work? No one can face unemployment as an added burden of trying to escape domestic violence.”
Along with being a stressful and time-consuming process, there are other reasons why abuse victims don’t follow through with getting a PFA immediately or ever, Higginbotham said.
“That being said, it is important that the courts create as few hurdles as possible for a victim to acquire a PFA,” she added.
Avoiding gaps
The impact of the prior late-morning PFA filing deadlines on Bucks County applicants is unclear. Elizabeth Fritsch, co-executive director of Legal Aid of Southeastern Pennsylvania, which provides PFA services in Bucks County, declined to comment on the situation.
A Woman’s Place doesn’t track the number of individuals who were unable to obtain same-day temporary protection from abuse orders or failed to return to court to extend emergency protection orders, Gaughan said. “I would say, the cases I do know of, they do come back the next day for a protection order,” she added.
No client of A Woman’s Place has been turned away because a petition was filed after the deadline, according to Jesse Steele, director of development for the organization. With late-filers, legal advocates would press the Common Pleas court to hear the petition, he said.
The updated policy and extended deadlines will benefit individuals, especially ones filing for a PFA on their own without legal help, he said.
“It’s really helpful now to have this clearly articulated policy and make sure there is no gaps,” Steele added.
The county established its previous PFA filing deadline following a 2013 Pennsylvania Superior Court ruling that found it unconstitutional for judges to review the protection requests without speaking to the person seeking it. The court ruling ended that previous practice in Bucks, Montgomery and 40 other counties.
Under the pre-2013 PFA request review system, petitions were accepted until the close of the business day, but it could take a day or longer for judge to review it and an applicant get an answer. Petitioners now get an answer the same day, as long as they meet the filing deadline.
The original noon hearing start time was picked because it gave the county prothonotary office, which processes the PFA orders, sufficient time after the hearings to process the paperwork, Heckman said. He added efforts were made to get late-filers before judges the same day.
The 2016 rule change was primarily to set hearing times for district judges to hear requests for emergency restraining orders for victims of sexual violence and intimidation who fall outside the state’s PFA law, Heckman said. It also formalized what he said were long-standing hours that district courts were authorized to hear emergency PFA requests. Several district judges, however, disputed they were authorized to hear emergency PFA petitions before 5 p.m. weekdays before the change.
Elsewhere in Pennsylvania, though, at least a half dozen counties accept petitions for temporary PFAs until at least 2:30 p.m. weekdays. At least three counties also hold hearings in the morning and afternoons.
In Montgomery County, which has 20 elected judges, PFA petitions for restraining orders are accepted until 1:30 p.m., said Stacy Dougherty, manager for Laurel House, Montgomery County’s domestic violence service provider.
It’s rare that a judge can’t hear an applicant on the same day, Dougherty added.
No studies exist on whether limited PFA filing windows at courts discourage domestic abuse victims from obtaining restraining orders, according to several local, state and federal victim advocates and domestic violence service organizations. But one national study agreed they pose obstacles.
In its 2010 report on improving civil protection order practices, the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges found barriers and gaps in services within county systems expose abuse victims to future risk of abuse.
“When a victim attempts to use the system and finds that she cannot or that she has used the ‘wrong door,’ she might not make further attempts. The system also puts a victim in danger when it requires that she try ‘multiple doors’ in order to obtain comprehensive protection,” according to the report.
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