Sister arrested for TRO violation.

What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)? NEW YORK

This is in reference to my sister who lives in New York City, NY.

She is in a custody battle for her child due to a pending divorce. He has been abusive towards her. In one of the their fights, she hit him back and left a mark, which he went to the police and had a TRO filed against her prohibiting any contact with him or their child.

Since then, he has called her cell phone a couple times under a blocked number, and due to the nature of her work, she has to answer her phone. When she answered the phone, he acted as if he just wanted her to talk to their child. However, he was taping the phone conversation. He took the tape to the police and had her arrested to violation of the restraining order. This has actually happened twice.

Another time, she had asked if she could run over to the house to pick up her purse and some clothes and he said yes. When she came over, he video taped it and had her arrested for violation.

Is there anything that she can do against this? To start I told her to call her carrier and set her phone to not accept blocked calls. But how can she be arrested for TRO violation when he was the one that called her? I know that NY is a one party consent state and he is within his legal rights to tape a call he consented to, but how can she be arrested for this when he placed the call?

From what I understand, he tapes phone calls he makes to her, phone calls with her friends and family asking after the health of the child, calls with the police and her lawyer, etc. All to be used as evidence against her in the custody case.

Is there anything she can do?

Rroldan82 said:

he tapes phone calls ... with ... her lawyer

Click to expand...

This is really something she needs to discuss with her attorney.

It is rare that the male gets a TRO against the female. If this occurred even after the hearing, I suspect there was some compelling evidence to show that it was necessary. Even if not, the order was still in effect and she should have abided by it. If he called her (and this is the call they based the arrest on) perhaps she engaged him in a longer conversation and tirade. She should have said, "Goodbye," and hung up.

She needs to speak with her legal counsel. Also keep in mind that anything she tells you, YOU can be forced to testify about in court. In other words, if she admits to talking to him, you would have to tell a court that she did it. There is no sibling confidentiality in the law.

Bah, I figured as much.

Only thing I could testify to say is that I think she is an idiot for not hanging up immediately. She didn't know she could be arrested for him contacting her. Neither did I for that matter. But I figured there would be some kind of help in the law against being trapped like that.

As for the TRO, I have no clue how he got it through. Seriously, my sister is 5'2" and 100 lbs sopping wet. He is a professional bouncer. The guy is HUGE. To this day I do not see how on earth that TRO didn't get laughed off.

A knife, weapon, or threats to do a "Bobbit" can go a long way to even the physical odds. It may also have been seen by the court that she was the instigator of incidents at home and as such the child(ren) was(were) not in a good place because of it.

The courts tend to take a dim view of the protected party making such a contact, but dropping the matter will be a decision for the prosecutor.