COA: Substance trumps form in domestic violence complaint.

Byline: David Donovan

Even before the current recession, courts in North Carolina were struggling to deal with a steady growth in the number of people trying to navigate the judicial system without the aid of an attorney. The uptick in pro se filings has increasingly left trial judges feeling squeezed between the legal requirements for motions and pleadings and the reticence to toss out meritorious claims over technicalities.

In the area of domestic violence complaints, at least, the state's Court of Appeals has come down on the side of valuing substance of form, reversing a trial court's decision to dismiss a plaintiff's request for a protective order simply because her complaint form had failed to reference any of the attachments detailing the allegations against her husband.

The plaintiff in the case (Lawyers Weekly is choosing not to use the litigants' names in this story) filed a pro se motion for a domestic violence protective order (DVPO), and her husband successfully persuaded a Jackson County District Court judge to dismiss the complaint on the grounds that the allegations were not specific enough. The allegations were detailed with extensive specificity in some attachments filed with the complaint, but these attachments were not referenced anywhere in the body of the complaint itself.

The husband in the case relied on the Court of Appeals' 2018 decision in Martin v. Martin, in which it ruled that anyone seeking a DVPO must include any alleged acts of domestic violence in writing in their complaints in order to introduce them as evidence at a hearing. Lawyers Weekly reported on the ruling at the time; in 2019 the court published a substitute opinion clarifying that courts may admit evidence of unpleaded domestic violence allegations so long as the complaint's allegations provide sufficient notice of the nature and basis of them.

But Judge Donna Stroud, writing for a unanimous Court of Appeals panel in a May 5 opinion, said that in any case the defendant's reliance on Martin was misplaced since it concerned the admission of evidence at a hearing, and not whether to dismiss a complaint for failure to state a claim. In this case, the plaintiff had stated her allegations with enough specificity to put her husband on notice of them, Stroud wrote.

"While plaintiff did not use legalese in her complaint, the attachments were included with the filed...