An incident that took place at a deposition being held in April 2024 in a Las Vegas law office should remind all family law practitioners that they tend to be at greater risk of harm in their work than other lawyers. Those attending a deposition in a divorce case involving child custody issues were present when gunfire erupted. Two persons, lawyer Dennis Prince and his wife Ashley, were shot and killed in the Prince Law Group offices by an elderly shooter, who then committed suicide, in a downtown Las Vegas law office. The problem is not a new one, however: decades ago, a Colorado domestic relations practitioner was shot “sniper style” through an office window by a disgruntled party posted outside the building. Undoubtedly, similarly alarming occurrences have taken place elsewhere as well.
Ending intimate partner relationships is stressful and is likely to be very stressful for both parties and the children, even when the partners agree to end their marriage or other intimate partnership arrangement. Some of the “stress” involved in ending an intimate partnership is a direct result of an abusive spouse’s reluctance to permit his or her (usually his) partner to provide a safer home (for the children) than the abusive partner would have had after the parents’ separation. Abuse of a spouse or living partner may be the result of the abuser’s own family history that has socialized the male abuser to believe that he is entitled to be in charge of everyone else in his family; this attitude is often called misogyny. It is also sometimes known as “male privilege,” which may result from such ideas in history or in some cultural or religious traditions.
Given the often highly conflicted nature of child-custody litigation, the strong emotional dynamics that resulted in domestic violence during a couple’s relationship may also have led to an enhanced risk of violence toward those involved in ending the parties’ marriage—a risk of physical violence to the divorcing parties, their children, and the attorneys who represent the divorcing parties. This author received more death threats from clients he defended in criminal cases, but many family law cases involved parties or their family members who had a high level of emotion regarding ending a marriage or custody of children, which could have resulted in safety risks to counsel on both sides. In the author’s experience, behaviors relating to clients’ addiction to controlled substances have also enhanced the risk levels to the professionals involved in such cases.
Risks of harm to attorneys and others involved are much greater when clients, witnesses, or opposing parties have developed a psychological disorder, as some of those lead to violent behaviors such as physical or sexual abuse or child neglect. Abuse by persons with antisocial personality disorder may involve behaviors of severe abuse and/or neglect of children and adults. It appears that childhood abuse and/or neglect may result in borderline personality disorder (BPD) in a child, which may be hidden until the disordered person faces real or perceived abandonment by a close relative or intimate partner on whom the disordered person depends for emotional support and/or physical (financial) support. A family law practitioner on whom a person with BPD depends may be at a high risk of harm if counsel seeks to withdraw or reduce the degree of assistance provided to the borderline client; the client’s abject fear of abandonment can give rise to threats of harm or death that relate to counsel’s expressed intent to withdraw from the borderline’s case. The municipal prosecutor in the author’s home city was murdered in 1994 by a former client of the author who was later diagnosed as having BPD; the woman’s apparent motive to kill the prosecutor was her perception that the prosecutor had refused to allow her and her 6-year-old daughter to use the spare room in his home during her financial straits, as he had done previously—in effect, “abandoning her” as her helper in her perception. This author had previously represented that woman, at the prosecutor’s request, in obtaining sole legal and physical custody of her daughter in litigation against the child’s father. The woman involved is now serving an 85-year sentence in Alaska’s women’s prison for the murder.
Addiction to controlled substances can also lead to child neglect and/or abuse by a parent, as well as continued substance use during family litigation cases. Given how controlled substances can affect users’ behaviors when under the extreme stresses of family litigation, practitioners may be under risk of harm from their clients as well as others who have emotional investments in the family legal positions.
Other kinds of harm may come to lawyers who represent clients such as two who threatened to kill the author during his representation of them; one was a male criminal defendant who was represented by the author (and charged with second-degree murder) and the other was a suicidal family law client in a child custody case who was in treatment for a near-fatal alcohol dose. The latter client, after threats to kill the author, later ingested a fatal dose of ethyl alcohol.
Mental harm can be an occupational hazard for attorneys who represent survivors of intimate partner violence, as the experience of having daily conversations with clients who were severely abused and seeing their declining mental health as a result of their harm can be debilitating and depressing at times. Likewise, observing clients’ physical injuries received from abusive partners can be profoundly depressing at times, at least until the clients are able to leave such abusive situations. Preparation for upcoming domestic violence protective order and child custody hearings involves extensive interviews about physical, mental and sexual abuse of the client by the abuser, as well as occasional long interviews with male abuse survivors. It may also be necessary for counsel in family law matters that involve physical harm to clients and/or children to seek mental health counseling to reduce the potential harm from that exposure, which can be termed “vicarious trauma” or may actually result in some level of post-traumatic stress disorder.
If a client’s actions produce fear of harm to the attorney or opposing counsel or the other party, the attorney may have to take steps either to convince the client to seek a competent mental health professional to deal with the client’s problematic behavior or to withdraw from the representation. Likewise, if a family law attorney begins to feel traumatized by clients’ accounts of their victimization, a licensed psychotherapist may be necessary.
Some important questions may come up when a practitioner considers ways in which domestic violence, child-custody, and divorce cases can be safe. Based on his observations of the Alaska Court System’s precautions, it is helpful if the courthouses have good security practices like screening all who enter for guns, sharp objects and potential explosive devices. Judges bench areas should include bulletproof areas, where judicial officers can quickly go to avert attempted violence in their courtrooms. Many of these precautions have been in place in larger cities, but smaller court venues may have less-secure facilities for financial and practical reasons, such as concerns about how much protection is necessary in a town that is in a rural or remote area.
Finally, it is essential that each new client be screened for their history of abuse and emotional harm. The following appendices consist of the author’s own screening devices. Appendix A contains the definition of coercive control, which is now included in the Model Code on Domestic and Family Violence adopted last year by the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (in the drafting of which the author took part).
Appendix A: Coercive Controlling Abuse
- (a) For purposes of this chapter, coercive controlling abuse is a pattern of conduct that has the purpose or effect of substantially restricting the other parent’s safety or autonomy through intimidation, implicit or explicit threats, or by compelling compliance.
- (b) Conduct undertaken by a parent to protect themselves or their children from the risk of present or future harm posed by the other parent does not constitute coercive controlling abuse.
- (c) The following is an inexhaustive list of examples of behaviors which may constitute coercive control if they are part of a pattern of conduct as defined in (a):
- (1) Monitoring and surveilling of daily personal activities;
- (2) Intensely managing or dictating the other parent’s personal day-to-day activities;
- (3) Intimidating the other parent;
- (4) Manipulating the other parent’s mental health status to the detriment of the other parent;
- (5) Isolating the other parent from friends, relatives, faith, cultural, or linguistic communities, employment, education, or other support networks;
- (6) Repeatedly humiliating or using degrading language towards the other parent;
- (7) Threatening to harm or abduct children;
- (8) Committing or threatening to commit cruelty or abuse to animals connected to the family;
- (9) Using repeated court actions not warranted by existing law or good faith argument to harass, coerce, or control the other party, diminish or exhaust the other party’s financial resources, or compromise the other party’s employment or housing;
- (10) Engaging in gaslighting behaviors towards the other parent;
- (11) Cleaning, accessing, displaying, using, or wearing a firearm in an intimidating or threatening manner; or
- (12) Threatening deportation or to contact local or federal agencies based on actual or perceived immigration status, refusing to file immigration applications, refusing to sponsor, withholding essential documents needed for immigration applications, or threatening to withdraw immigration applications filed on the other parent’s or child’s behalf or coercing or forcing the other parent to violate the terms of their immigration visa.
(Source: Allen M. Bailey)
Appendix B: Domestic Violence Screening Tool
(Note to attorneys: Survivors often are reluctant to disclose abuse and often do not consider things like throwing objects, sleep deprivation or nonconsensual sex to be abuse.)
- Has there been any physical violence toward you or another family member?
- Has he ever pushed you?
- Has he ever hit you or struck you with anything?
- Has he ever pulled your hair?
- Has he ever thrown things in your home? What?
- Has he ever punched walls or doors when he was angry?
- Has he ever pointed a gun at you?
- Has he ever shot a gun during an argument?
- Does he have any knives?
- Has he ever brandished a gun or a knife during an argument?
- Has he ever cleaned his guns while you are having an argument?
- Has he ever put anything around your neck that gave you trouble breathing?
- Has he ever hit or held you so tightly that it caused bruises? Did anyone else see them?
- Has he said anything that frightened you?
- Has he ever kicked you?
- Has he ever hurt your child?
- Has he ever driven recklessly when you were in the car? When the children were in the car?
- Has he ever awakened you in the middle of the night to “discuss” things with you? How often? Is he very jealous or possessive?
- Has he ever called you names? What? How did you feel when he did that? Has he kept control over all of your money?
- Has he ever tried to discourage you from having friends or seeing your family?
- Has he ever pushed you around during arguments by bumping you with his chest?
- Has he ever mistreated any of your animals?
- Has he ever spit on you?
- Has he ever had sex with you without your consent?
- Has he ever forced you to have sex with him?
- Has he ever restricted your liberty, holding you down or against a wall or refusing to let you out of a room?
- Has he ever stalked you, physically by following you or waiting for you somewhere?
- Has he ever electronically stalked you by using your phone to locate where you are or where you go?
(Note to attorneys: Then, I make an assessment of the lethality of the situation before advising the client on safety and strategy issues. A good resource is Neil Websdale’s Lethality Assessment Tools: a Critical Analysis@ on the University of Minnesota s MINCAVA website. If that is not available, there are excellent materials in Assessing Dangerousness; Violence by Batterers and Child Abusers, 2d Ed., Jacquelyn C. Campbell, Ed., Springer Publishing Co. (2007).)
- Does he have a job?
- Does he abuse alcohol or another drug?
- Do you have a child in your home who is not your partner’s natural child? Has he ever attempted or threatened to commit suicide?
- Does he have any guns? How many and what kind, if you know?
- Did he put anything around your neck that impaired your breathing? Did you pass out?
(Source: Allen M. Bailey)
