Committee hears testimony on domestic violence protective order cases in Ky. courts

FRANKFORT, Ky. (WKYT) - Senator Cassie Chambers Armstrong, D-Louisville, started her career providing free legal aid to low-income people experiencing domestic violence.

She says that in her time working in the state's rural areas, she often noticed that the challenges she faced were different from those of her colleagues in urban areas.

"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 and how our urban courts and our rural courts work," said Senator Armstrong.

Thursday, Senator Armstrong presented her research on domestic violence protective order cases in Kentucky to the Interim Joint Committee on Judiciary. She explained that she hopes to answer a few questions with her research.

"Where are we under-resourcing our different types of systems? And ultimately, at the end of the day, what can we do to support survivors of domestic violence and make sure that they can navigate the court system and all these laws we pass to support survivors mean something, because people can utilize the courts for relief," said Armstrong.

She says her research is based on cases in 101 courtrooms across 76 Kentucky counties. It looked at the differences between urban and rural court systems regarding things like attorney access.

"There's almost a ten percentage point difference in the likelihood that folks were going to have attorney access," said Armstrong.

Regarding access to legal aid, Senator Chambers' data found that people in rural areas, on average, had to travel farther than those in urban areas.

"For urban folks, those resources were about 17 minutes from their house. In rural cases, for our rural petitioners, they had to travel almost an hour to get to a legal aid office. And you can think about all the ways that creates a barrier to folks even initiating the protective order process," said Armstrong.

Aubrey Girouard is an attorney with The Nest. She represents people in protective order courts in both rural and urban counties. Girouard says she's witnessed firsthand a need for more wraparound services across the Commonwealth.

"Wraparound services is not just legal representation, but it is community advocacy, participating with each other, speaking and talking to each other and having a community issue and focusing on the accountability of these aggressors," said Girouard. "I gave legal advice and representation to 309 people in the year of 2023 and I was physically able to be in court for 98 of those people."

Those people have been in both urban and rural counties. Girouard says while her clients in urban areas often struggle to find access to resources such as shelters, the pool of options is much smaller for those in rural areas.

"The only thing I can give them is, well, there's resources over here in the urban county, you can come over here. Well, can they? Do they have a car? Does the aggressor let them drive their car?" said Girouard.

Senator Armstrong says she doesn't have any legislation drafted based on the data she presented, but she hopes it will spark a conversation about the areas the state can improve to support survivors of domestic violence.