Judge Amy Karan has served as the administrative judge of the Domestic Violence Court in Miami, Florida, since 1997. She spoke with the Center for Court Innovation’s Carolyn Turgeon about her experiences.
Can you describe your court?
My court is a combination criminal and civil domestic violence court. That means we handle temporary restraining orders, final restraining orders, and all misdemeanor crimes of domestic violence, including battering, stalking, and violations of the restraining orders or orders of protection.
There are several different models for domestic violence courts. Some are purely criminal, some are purely civil, some are a mixed version like mine. Some handle only felonies while some handle only misdemeanors. My court is one of the oldest and largest. It was piloted in 1991. We are a model that many other courts around the country have followed when setting up their own courts.
What are the advantages of having the mixed model?
You have the same judges who have the specialized training and interest in doing the domestic violence cases. If I’m doing the civil injunction, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m doing the criminal portion. It’s not specifically designed so that one judge continues with the case. But the dedicated division means we’re all working as a team together in the area.
How effective have domestic violence courts been, in your opinion?
I can’t give you number results, but I believe that in our court first time offenders are more likely to get treatment because of the specialized, dedicated way we treat the cases. They’re more likely to get batterers’ intervention treatment along with the substance abuse treatment, if necessary, and that goes a long way towards preventing recidivism for those first-time offenders. Now for the repeat offenders, obviously you need more than just a batterers’ intervention program, and we have a combination of jail as a sanction combined with the treatment, plus the heavy oversight of the judicial review. And that means we bring these cases back every 30, 60, or 90 days, depending on what type of offender we have, and we keep tight rein over the respondents for accountability.
In the conventional court you’re probably just there to call the balls and strikes. In this kind of a dedicated court the goal is to stop the violence and you do what’s necessary in order to hold the offenders accountable and provide the victim and child safety. So that’s really the difference. There’s a lot more involvement by the court. I think the handling of the court in a specialized fashion is great because everyone—from the judges to the prosecutors, defense lawyers, probation officers and clerks—is trained and dedicated. Basically, every component of the court is coordinated.
Before this court was created, domestic violence cases weren’t given any type of priority or consistent handling. They were sprinkled throughout all the criminal and civil divisions, so if you were a defendant in a domestic violence case you’d find yourself on a calendar with shoplifters, DUI defendants, trespassers, and so on. There was no specialized treatment; you didn’t have specialized probation, you didn’t have specialized prosecutors, the case wouldn’t be called up or fast-tracked. These cases need to be dealt with in a very timely fashion. Evidence tends to evaporate when you don’t.
Did you have any initial skepticism?
Well I wasn’t sure about the efficacy of the therapeutic jurisprudence model with the treatment being the featured option instead of jail. And I’m still not convinced that that is always the appropriate response. It has to be on a case by case basis. Some people are going to be very amenable to the treatment, and that’s what we want, but we worry about the victims thinking, “Oh, he’s in treatment; he’s all better! I’m safe.” So we worry about that.
But I felt the court was addressing something that had been addressed in Florida in a shotgun fashion, and now it was focusing in on the target and doing it in a systemic, consolidated, coordinated way with everyone pretty much on the same page. And that, of course, is a big difference.
What do you see as the key components of a domestic violence court?
Dedicated staff, training, oversight of the offenders, accountability, and victim safety as a priority. Those are our key components.
What has Florida done in terms of the integrated domestic violence court model?
We call them unified family courts. Actually, I am the chairperson of the Unified Family Court Advisory Board here in Dade County, and the Florida Supreme Court has mandated that we go to a unified family court model. The model is not necessarily one judge/one family, but it’s a coordinated one, so if parties involved in my domestic violence cases also have a crossover case, like in domestic relations, the two judges either sit together on the case—what we call triage—or one judge or the other will handle both aspects of it so that we don’t have a redundancy in rulings and hearings. And we also have the juvenile dependency as a link in that. So we have juvenile dependency, domestic violence, and family courts all coordinated under the unified family court umbrella. That’s been around for about three years now.
We have a large advisory board and we’ve had some pilot projects, and we’ve sat down and drafted a series of procedures and protocols. We just keep tweaking the system as we see how it goes. We’re talking to end users of the system and seeing how it’s been for them and where we can make improvements and the advisory board meets on a regular basis to improve the system.
Our goal is that people won’t have to tell their story 10 different places. Previously, a victim of domestic violence might have to tell her story to the police, then to the intake counselor and then to the prosecutor and then to the domestic violence judge and then to the criminal judge and then to the divorce judge, and if children were involved in dependency, to the dependency judge. We’ve tried to consolidate that so that the system is easier to navigate. We can consolidate your services and consolidate your court appearances so that one or two judges at the most are handling all of your issues. It’s more effective for all parties concerned.
What advice can you give to planners?
Get all the players at the table. Make sure you’re consulting with everyone involved—including probation, the defense bar, your public defender, corrections, your prosecutor, and your police—and develop a plan in writing. Consult with the other courts around the country that have been successful. Take a look at the models that are out there. Do you want to do a pure criminal court, a pure civil court, or a mixture court? Talk to the people who have been doing that court successfully. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Innovation is great but there are a lot of blueprints out there that you can use and even improve upon. But the idea is just to get everyone at the table, get everybody on the same page working towards the same goal. You don’t want to be fighting an uphill battle against any component of the system because you didn’t consult with them when you were formulating.