Someone writes: “I made false allegations to obtain a PPO [an order of protection]. What do I do?”
Disappointingly, this is the first such query this blog has received. Hearteningly, it’s something. And this person should congratulate him- or herself on having a belated pang of conscience.
The ethical, if facile, answer to his or her (most likely her) question is have the order vacated and apologize to the defendant and offer to make amends. The conundrum is that this would-be remedial conclusion may prompt the defendant to seek payback in the form of legal action against the plaintiff for unjust humiliation and suffering. (Plaintiffs with a conscience may even balk from recanting false testimony out of fear of repercussions from the court. They may not feel entitled to do the right thing, because the restraining order process, by its nature, makes communication illegal.)
The lion’s share of the blame for fraud and its damages, of course, clearly falls on the shoulders of plaintiffs—the knots are theirs to untie—but the court should also recognize culpability.
The restraining order process is a honeypot to people nursing a grudge: it’s cheap, convenient, and accommodating. Its making the means to lash out readily available to anyone with a malicious impulse might even be called entrapment. And the court neither acknowledges this process’s consequences to wrongly accused defendants nor impresses upon plaintiffs the consequences to them of making false allegations.
(One defendant I corresponded with this year—who happily succeeded in having the order against her quashed months and thousands of dollars later—was clawing her hair out and dosing herself to sleep. Her young daughter was traumatized by the episode, too. She was accused of domestic violence by a man she’d briefly renewed a friendship with. He was put up to baselessly attacking her through the courts by his wife, who felt jealous—which he admitted in court after dragging the defendant through hell.)
By definition, a civil process shouldn’t foster discord and distress. Maybe lawmakers should mandate a cooling-off period before judges are authorized to approve restraining orders, as they do with handgun purchases.
Or maybe they should put this corrupt institution on ice.
Copyright © 2012 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com
TALKING BACK to restraining orders 
Well, in reference to your last statement, I think there should be a cooling-off period for restraining orders. However, I think the cooling-off period should be about a month or so. Even then, an the respondent and/or petitioner may hold a grudge against the other. It’s like a cat scratching a dog, and the dog wants revenge.
In the realm of domestic violence, the restraining order is but a form of barratry that leads to contention. The judges have been attorneys. They are well aware of the potential issues that come about when two individuals have a dispute. The American adversarial system turns people into adversaries. Once that happens, people may as well kiss their relationships goodbye. Sure, it’s a piece of paper. Yes, if an individual drops the TRO, or temporary restraining order or emergency order, then the allegations lack any testing for validity. As such, it gives the respondent a potential to let go of a grudge, because the allegations were untested.
It does not, however, really fix anything. Even if the two individuals cool off, they may not get back together. The petitioner may hold an increased fear of the respondent, because the petitioner had become cross with the respondent. As such, the petitioner may regret filing the order. However, the petitioner did file the petition. It strongly shows on the petitioner’s character, and false statements of fact (be they intentional) show an obvious level of maliciousness. Be that they were not intentional (or deliberate), then the petitioner is delusional, mistaken, or incorrect about what he or she believes to be the Truth.
It becomes obvious, then, to say that a single lie (a deliberate lie) is a sign of malice. The malice can be further shown by the lack of interaction the petitioner toward the respondent after the order is dropped. The petitioner is having a hissy-fit.
I definitely think that an individual should make a motion to vacate and dismiss “without prejudice” if he or she has false allegations in a restraining order (thus learns to find that they are false, intentionally false, etc.). This gives the individual an opportunity to re-file and be of an honest and good character, be that the order as an injunction is desired to cause the respondent to conduct or omit some action(s).
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Your lines of reasoning expose what’s most pernicious about this legal process, which was conceived to appease an outraged proportion of the populace without any real reconsideration of its practical consequences or value.
Like you say, restraining orders fix nothing. They weren’t meant to. They were meant to protect people (women) in dicey or dangerous situations. The fervor for broader and broader applications has translated into the same instrument that was originally meant to arrest domestic violence being applied to any sort of generic nuisance. And there’s an urge by the plaintiff to amplify or put an edge on his or her allegations to make them more urgent. A plaintiff is in a real sense coerced by his or her own emotions to justify his or her application to the court for relief and to succeed, that is, to commit and not back down. Efforts by the defendant to counteract allegations that were fudged or exaggerated (whether hysterically or maliciously) prompt the plaintiff to double down and even more strenuously assert his or her apprehension, etc., because s/he may well be as afraid of the court’s disapproval as the defendant is.
The court furthermore has committed to a ruling just by approving a restraining order in the first place, and it too feels coercive pressure to justify its own interpretation, which was never a legitimate one in the first place, because that interpretation was made in the absence of any contravening evidence or testimony. Restraining orders are approved in mere minutes based solely on the persuasiveness of a plaintiff’s representations, which needless to say are bound to be self-serving.
The court is moreover coerced by political pressures to give credence to and find merit in plaintiffs’ allegations on no other basis than that they’ve been made.
The entire process is coerced and cruelly coercive. The public, by and large, knows none of this, and the court pretends not to.
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