Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Protection Orders topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Senate Judiciary reviews House changes to S.9 on after-hours protection orders
Summary
The Senate Judiciary committee reviewed House amendments to S.9 that add two technical changes: clarifying emergency filing hours and aligning service procedures for certain protection orders with domestic-violence practice. Advocates said the changes will help survivors; committee staff said they will follow up on next procedural steps.
Senate Judiciary committee members on April 15 examined House amendments to S.9, a bill that adds after-hours access to forensic protection orders for assault and addresses related procedural changes.
Michelle Childs, Office of Legislative Council, told the committee she was presenting the “as passed by house version of s 9 and after hours access to orders against ****** assault,” and that the House had added two new sections while leaving the committee’s section 3 unchanged.
The House additions are technical, Childs said. Section 1 clarifies how emergency relief is filed for certain orders — noting that some complaints must still be filed during regular court hours — while section 2 aligns service procedures so that when a defendant is present in court at the time an order is issued the court may mail the order rather than require a law-enforcement officer to make a separate in-person service. Childs described section 3 as unchanged from the committee’s earlier draft, including the bill’s date provisions.
“they did not make any changes to basically what the senate passed, which is in section 3 of the bill,” Childs said, describing sections 1 and 2 as the new additions from the House.
Charlie Lisonbee, policy director with the Vermont Network Against Domestic and Sexual Violence, told the committee the organization supports the changes. “We support these changes,” Lisonbee said, adding that aligning the service and filing procedures with existing domestic-violence practice should benefit survivors and court administration.
Committee members asked no substantive questions during the discussion. Childs said she would check with the secretary about the next procedural step and suspected, because the bill is already on the action calendar, that the sponsor could take it up the following day. Senator Norris, who had reported the initial bill out of committee, was to be kept informed of the secretary’s guidance.
No formal vote or floor action was recorded in the committee transcript provided. The committee discussion focused on clarifying filing hours for emergency relief, matching service procedures to those used for domestic-violence protection orders, and confirming that the committee’s previously adopted section allowing after-hours access (section 3) remains in place.
