Some state government officials are raising awareness about the inadequacies of the current court system in the Commonwealth as it pertains to domestic violence cases.
Senator Cassie Chambers Armstrong spoke to the Interim Joint Committee on Judiciary in Frankfort about her past experiences working to provide legal aid to low-income people experiencing domestic violence.
“The challenges that I saw in my role in rural courts felt different than many of the challenges that my colleagues were seeing in the urban courts in Louisville. And I realized that some of those concerns don’t necessarily get elevated in the same way when we’re talking about our court system. And that set me off on this path to begin to try to quantify that, to begin to try to find evidence of what are the differences in how our urban courts and our rural courts work,” said Armstrong.
Armstrong collected data from 101 different county courts across the commonwealth and said she discovered a wealth of deficiencies statewide. She said low levels of service were seen in both courts.
“Low levels of representation for both our petitioners and our respondents regardless of where they were, low entering of ancillary orders for child support, child custody. And we did see some differences based on place. We did see less representation in rural areas, less access to information about supportive services in rural areas, and some key differences in what those dockets look like and how those dockets operate across the state,” said Armstrong.
She said on average those living in rural areas had to travel further for any legal aid they did receive. Armstrong said these kinds of barriers to justice are unacceptable.
There is not currently any legislation being considered about these issues, Armstrong said her purpose was to bring this topic into discussion.