Domestic Violence and Evictions: a Literal Denial of Equal Protection

A bit late to this, but How Domestic Violence Survivors Get Evicted From Their Homes After Calling the Police, from Annamarya Scaccia, is just as horrifying as you would imagine from the title.

As outlined in the federal lawsuit filed April 24 on behalf of Briggs by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the ACLU of Pennsylvania (ACLU-PA), and Philadelphia law firm Pepper Hamilton LLP, Briggs had already been given three strikes under Norristown’s discretionary Rental License Ordinance. The ordinance gives the Montgomery County municipality the right to countermand a landlord’s rental license and provoke a tenant’s eviction if police respond to three “disorderly behavior” calls in four months, including domestic disturbances in which a mandatory arrest in not required.

The strikes Briggs received were the result of police calls made in April and May of last year—two of which were due to acts of domestic violence committed against her. In May, the borough began proceedings to revoke her landlord Darren Sudman’s rental license, but granted the property—and by extension Briggs—a 30-day probationary period after a late May hearing. Any violation during that period would have resulted in rescindment and eviction, claims the lawsuit.

That’s right – the County basically punishes the landlord for failing to punish a woman who’s experiencing domestic violence by evicting her.

Against Judicial Supremacy, for Democracy

[T]he candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties, in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.

Abraham Lincoln, quoted in Larry Kramer, The People Themselves.