The police have 24 hours to present before the court any person accused of breaching a Domestic Violence Protection Order (DVPO).
I've previously written at some length about the legislation relating to DVPOs.
Briefly, a DVPO is a civil order that can be made by the court if it is satisfied that one person (P) has been violent, or threatened violence, against another person (V). The court also needs to consider the order necessary to protect V from violence, or the threat of violence, by P.
The maximum penalty for breaching a DVPO is 2 months' custody.
Due to a combination of unforeseen circumstances the court recently had a very tight deadline to deal with an alleged DVPO breach.
There was an hour left on the clock when we heard that the defendant was on their way to the daily remand court.
The police could have been presented him the previous afternoon, but for whatever reason failed to do so.
It wasn't a long journey from the police custody suite, but the wheels of bureaucracy being what they are it took the best part of 45 minutes for the defendant to arrive in the precincts of the court.
Barely 10 minutes left on the clock the Legal Advisor rang the cells to find out if he had arrived. To our relief he had, so we asked for him to be brought immediately to the court room.
We sat and waited. And waited some more. And waited some more.
It would usually take 4 or 5 minutes to get someone from the cells to the court room, but we were now at 6 or 7 minutes - in other words, there were only 3 or 4 minutes left on the clock.
The Legal Advisor rang the cells again to find out what was happening. The reply came "sorry, that message (about bringing him straight to the court room) hadn't been passed on".
The clock ran out 3 minutes before the defendant arrived in the court room, so he was reminded of the conditions of his DVPO and immediately released from custody.
The alleged breach was quite serious, but on this occasion we could take matters no further.
Frustrating.
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