Domestic Violence Defendants
in State Courts

Purpose: establish a baseline against which to compare future domestic violence studies

Participating jurisdictions represent
a convenience sample, based on
a 2-stage stratified sample design

Difficulty negotiating access to prosecutor files

Once county participation was determined, the sample of cases was chosen

Data collection instrument
was developed

Case processing data
would be collected separately

Data were recorded for 5,218 DV defendants charged in 16 large urban counties in May 2002

Demographic characteristics of
DV victims and defendants were similar

Many of the incident-level variables
were reported from prosecutor files
in high percentages

Some incident-level variables were
not reported in high enough percentages
to yield reliable results

A follow-up study examining recidivism rates of domestic violence defendants
is currently in progress