GLASTONBURY, CONNECTICUT · FAMILY LAW + FAMILY-VIOLENCE DEFENSE
An arrest during a separation produces two cases. They are in different courthouses, on different schedules, before different judges, with different rules — and each one can damage the other.
This is the situation the firm is built around.
National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233
CT Safe Connect: (888) 774-2900 — 24/7, by call, text, chat, or email
The criminal case moves fastest. Arraignment is the next court day, and a protective order can enter immediately. That order may bar you from the family home and restrict contact with your children before any family judge has considered custody at all.
In practical terms, the criminal court sets the status quo that the family court then works from. That is backwards from how most people assume it works, and it is why the first 48 hours matter so much.
A no-contact or residential order constrains what the family court can realistically order next, at least initially.
Connecticut’s best-interest statute names the effect of domestic violence as an explicit consideration, and Connecticut’s family-law definition of domestic violence includes coercive control, not only physical violence.
Statements in a family proceeding — affidavits, testimony, even an apologetic email — can surface in the criminal case. The Fifth Amendment is available to you in the family case, but invoking it there has consequences of its own, since a family judge may draw inferences a criminal jury could not.
Resolving the criminal case quickly can look sensible and cost you in the custody case. Delaying the family case to let the criminal case resolve has its own costs. Neither choice is obviously right, and making it well requires seeing both files.
Most people in this position end up with two lawyers who have never spoken to each other, coordinating between them while in the middle of the worst months of their life. Each lawyer optimizes their own case. Nobody is managing the interaction.
The firm handles both. That is not a slogan about efficiency — it means the decision about whether to take a plea gets made with the custody consequences in front of the person making it.
A protective order and a restraining order are different things, and a criminal case does not substitute for the protection a civil restraining order provides, or for what the family court can order about your children.
How Connecticut restraining orders work under C.G.S. §46b-15 — applying, responding, the hearing, and what an order does. Glastonbury attorney Daniel M. Morton.
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Family violence is an explicit custody factor in Connecticut, and the definition includes coercive control. How it affects parenting orders.
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Arrested for a family violence offense in Connecticut? What happens at arraignment, what a protective order does, and how the Family Violence Education Program works.
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Every case starts with a conversation about what you’re facing and what it would take to handle it.
