Defenders of battered women need the right tools to make the right charges stick (@NOLAnews story)

Da Paper makes the acquittal of Dane DeLarge on charges of "cyberstalking" out to be an issue of the law, but the greater concern is what to do with men who threaten women with violence.

According to Da Paper, Mr. DeLarge didn't take breaking up with his girlfriend well:

DeLarge didn't testify, but his ex-girlfriend, Keshia Hutton, took the stand at Magistrate Court during the one-hour misdemeanor trial Thursday, saying that DeLarge made 100 phone calls to her cell phone between Aug. 11 and Aug. 13, 2009, after she had asked him to leave her alone.

Now, here's what I don't get. The District Attorney's office has a complaint about a guy who made a hundred calls to his ex in two days. From the article, it looks like the ex was able to secure a protection order against DeLarge, which he was then charged with violating. He was also charged with simple assault. DeLarge beat the violation charge--both of them being at a "downtown club" doesn't sound like that had much legs--and the simple assault charge (verbal threats) was tossed by the judge, who ordered a new trial.

The DA didn't think the hundred phone calls and the verbal threats would sell, so they took a different route: cyberstalking. According to the ex, DeLarge also texted threats to her:

Hutton said she reported the activity to police and showed 6th District police officer Yolanda Quincy a troubling text message.

"The text said, 'Bitch, you're not going to see your first day of school,'" Quincy testified.

But it looks like showing the message to a NOPD officer wasn't good enough:

Hutton said she didn't photocopy the text message, and prosecutors said that her Sprint, her service provider, doesn't retain content of text messages. Gorrell wouldn't accept the Sprint cell-phone records as evidence because they lacked Hutton's name or address, but prosecutors pointed out the crush of cell-phone calls made from DeLarge's cell to Hutton's.

There wasn't enough of a cyber-trail to prove cyberstalking.

There was one aspect of the reporting that bothered me.  At the beginning of the article, reporter Gwen Filosa mentions where Mr. DeLarge attended high school:

Dane DeLarge, a college student and graduate of St. Augustine High School, was acquitted by Magistrate Commissioner Rudy Gorrell after Gorrell questioned the district attorney's office grasp of the state law that rarely makes the docket at Orleans Parish Criminal District Court.

My first reaction was that it was a cheap shot at the Catholic school, or an attempt to code-word relate that DeLarge was not just your basic thug. Apologies to Ms. Filosa for thinking these things, because the connection becomes clearer as the story developed:

Hutton said DeLarge threatened to "f--- me over" and bragged about his political connections.

"His cousin is a police officer and his father knows the judge," Hutton testified.

Quincy said that instead of calling DeLarge, she spoke with one of his relatives who works at the Police Department.

OK, so DeLarge is "connected." The reference to St. Augustine would tend to support that.

Mr. DeLarge is a 24-year old man, not a juvenile. Why would an NOPD officer go speak with one of his cop relatives? The man is being accused of some fairly serious crimes, and the local criminal justice system is fighting a very poor image when it comes to domestic abuse cases of late. What this man needed was to be treated like any other accused perpetrator. Officer Quincy's actions here should have been referred to the NOPD's Public Integrity Bureau, and the relative on the force should also be interviewed, to determine why said relative didn't instruct Quincy to follow through with the investigation.

What should victims advocates and women threated with abuse take away from this? Three things:

• Document phone calls. You can buy one of those little digital recorders for $50 at Office Depot. One wonders if this young man left any voicemails while he was making all those phone calls. I understand that a twentysomething young lady who feels a man is threatening her isn't very much in a state of mind where evidence-gathering is a priority, but clearly if she got a protective order taken out on DeLarge, she had others involved who could have advised her. Keep the text message on the phone, get a digital camera to record the screen, possibly even photocopy the phone display. Don't assume that just because text messages were retrieved to convict a mayor in Detroit they'll nail your old boyfriend.
• Follow-up on police actions. If Hutton called the cops on DeLarge for the text message, an incident report was written up and could be obtained by its "item number" from NOPD. On that report, the officer would have to write up the action taken to resolve the incident. "Talking to a relative" or some such should have raised a red flag with the victim and her advocates.
• Lean on politicians! If someone called me a hundred times in two days, I'd bloody well want to know why that in and of itself wasn't enough to take action against that person. Why did DA Cannizaro's office feel the need to push the envelope with the cyberstalking charge? It's got more teeth, but the text message in this case was a stretch.

This is the kind of case that scares you. Hopefully since this man is from a family who is supposedly "connected," someone will sit him down and keep him away from this ex-girlfriend, in the hopes that we won't see another "fall through the cracks" story about another beaten or worse woman.