Poster #140 - Routine or Responsive? Domestic Violence Release Conditions at First Appearance

• In Event: Poster Session II (posters 80 – 155)

Abstract

At first appearance hearings, Florida judges set the conditions of release that govern a domestic violence defendant for the weeks and months before case disposition. These conditions reach beyond the defendant, with no-contact terms, separate-residence requirements, and pretrial supervision shaping where the victim lives, whether and how the parties can co-parent, and how ordinary contact becomes a violation largely outside the victim's control. Although judges have broad discretion at this stage, the arrest affidavit is often the only substantive account available to them at this hearing. The current study explores if the content of these affidavits is meaningfully shaping release decisions, or if decisions have collapsed into a routine default conditions package that gets applied regardless of details presented in the affidavit. Using an original dataset of domestic violence arrest affidavits paired with first appearance orders from one large metropolitan judicial district, this study tests whether indicators of seriousness, risk, and victim engagement predict the number and type of conditions imposed, after controlling for other case and defendant features. In doing so, this study examines whether officer-written narratives function as consequential inputs in early pretrial decision-making or merely accompany decisions that are already standardized.

Author

• Nathan Joseph LaMothe, University of Central Florida