A local judge grappled last week with the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office over a new state law he said forces him to bill the county for orders of protection people don’t want.
In a letter Friday, Hamilton County Circuit Court Judge Neil Thomas III said he billed the state for certain protection-order cases because the state had, in fact, created them whether people requested them or not.
“In at least 98 percent of the cases since January 1, 2017, there has either been a ‘no-show’ or the victim has said that he or she told the officer that he or she did not want an order of protection,” Thomas wrote to Deputy Attorney General C. Scott Jackson about the cases in his courtroom.
State courts issue orders of protection to help victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking. In a 2015 report, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said 270 people were killed by domestic violence between 2012 and 2014. So state legislators added a provision to their sweeping Public Safety Act of 2016 to address the issue.
“Unfortunately, often times victims in domestic abuse are the very ones who fear filing an order of protection because they fear retaliation,” Sen. Brian Kelsey, R-Memphis, who worked on the law, said in June. “So that’s why we allow law enforcement to intervene on their behalf.”