Grant Dossetto has a degree in finance he can’t use.
That’s because a personal protection order (PPO) was petitioned against him in 2010 by a friend, and the law mandates that all restraining order recipients be registered in the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database—indefinitely.
The Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 requires those working in my field to be fingerprinted and to submit that to the FBI national database. This is on top of normal background checks, disclosure of any and all charitable donations as well as political donations, etc. Ironically we don’t have to pee in a cup for a drug test, but everything else goes well beyond that which my engineering friends et al. have been subjected to. I went to the Livonia police department and had my prints pressed in ink the old fashioned way on the standard card to be delivered to my employer by my first week of employment. The card then was supposed to find its way to the proper regulatory authorities before getting passed through the system.
A month after I began work at the brokerage, I was called by my boss after hours and told to mail back in my key. He fired me while out of town over the phone.
Grant is 27 years old, and he can never realize his ambition to be a stockbroker.
To this day, I have never been sponsored to get my licenses, and I am sure I never will. I can pass the CFA [to become a chartered financial analyst] but cannot take an order for a trade. The PPO destroyed my career.
Though his mother lived to see him earn his degree with honors in 2009, neither of Grant’s parents will ever know that their investment in their son’s success was betrayed or that his professional aspirations were dashed, because they’ve passed away.
When my father had a heart attack, I was just 14 years old. He passed in his sleep. Before my mom had dragged him off to bed, he had fallen asleep in my room while we were watching TV together and drooled on my pillow. When he didn’t wake the next morning, I can remember opening his mouth to try to resuscitate him and seeing how his tongue was already blackened from lack of oxygen. It was the first time I had to let in an EMT through the wide double front doors to go through the motions to tend to someone who was already gone.
Grant’s mother died in 2010 just days before Grant got word of the court order that identified him as a threat to the safety of a woman he hadn’t even seen in over a year.
I was celebrating a birthday party with my twin brother. He had just been commissioned as an artillery officer in the Marine Corps and was heading to Fort Sill in Oklahoma for training in a couple weeks, so it was a going away party as well. It ended with me carrying my mom up from the bottom of the stairs that led to the basement, blood trickling from the back of her head. She had had a stroke bringing up a food tray and collapsed. The right hemisphere of her brain immediately ceased all activity. I got to stand over another pair of EMTs, this time dabbing her eyes with a tissue. The pupils, fully dilated, failed to show any reaction. She maintained enough brain function to throw up, trying to recover from the worst concussion you could imagine, but by the next day a second opinion came back that she could not survive. My brother and I pulled the plug and held her hand until she forgot to breathe on her own. It took less than a half hour. It was a brilliantly sunny Michigan May day, those days that make suffering through the gray winter worth it. It’s hard to imagine something more at odds with how I felt.
Grant learned a protection order had been issued against him two days later. Notice of it was waiting for him upon his return from the funeral home in the form of a business card a sheriff handed his stepdad.
In Grant’s home state of Michigan, this qualifies as service. No copy of the order was ever provided to him.
I called the sheriff back, and he went through what I would later come to find out was the front page of the order. He asked me to drive to downtown Detroit, a half hour away, to be served the order. Seeing as I had seven hours of funeral activities in a day and a half, I told him that would be impossible. He said he’d mail it to me. I was never notified that I had just days to appeal or given an explanation of the consequences of the order. The order was never mailed to me. I tried twice to notify the officer that I had not received the PPO. He brushed it off once, and the second call went to voicemail and was never returned.
Grant was denied the opportunity to defend himself in court against an accuser he hadn’t even been in physical proximity to.
The last thing I had said to her was that my mom had died, and I was giving the eulogy at the funeral and would like her there even though we had our differences. The order had been issued ex parte, which requires the court to classify me as an immediate threat who will cause imminent and irreparable damage, per Michigan law. I did not meet those criteria. The hearing was held without my knowledge or participation.
No surprise, Grant has “suffered from severe depression that still surfaces at times now.” His case exemplifies the justice system’s willingness to compound the stresses of real exigencies like family crises with false exigencies like nonexistent danger.
My grandparents were going through their own personal troubles. One had emergency quadruple bypass surgery and is suffering from dementia. One was declared terminal and hung on for two and a half years as his kidneys shut down until he was also unable to tell reality from fiction. One had a hip replacement turn into a seven-surgery odyssey that involved a severe staph infection that ravaged her for most of a year. She needed over 50 blood transfusions over that period and has just recovered from fatigue in the past 12 months. I got a lifetime of bad news I couldn’t control in a couple years, and it took its toll on me.
The order of the court that turned Grant’s career path into a blind alley was petitioned by a woman whose own prospects, Grant says, declined during his senior year of college.
We enjoyed movies, card games (she cheats at euchre), parties, went to school football and hockey games. She sought me out in the parking lot of the campus church and asked me to sit with her at mass. I can’t think of an act of friendship much more intimate than that. When we were close, she was on the dean’s list.
I had been friends with her from September, sophomore year of college until midway through my senior year. In a month, I went from being someone she talked to on Facebook at one in the morning and publically said she loved to being accused of felony property damage—tire-slashing, in particular.
She had gotten involved with a bad crowd, joined a terrible varsity team at school. In April of my junior year, she asked a mutual friend of ours to do cocaine—not exactly something a happy person says. The next fall, I heard about how her parents didn’t give a damn about her, and in November she called my roommate and me over only to snap at us until she kicked us out just before 10 to take a tablespoon of Nyquil that would force her to sleep. She also talked about how she had been getting dizzy and suffering from vertigo, which got her a prescription medication. A doctor had said it was iron deficiency. I can tell you from personal experience it was stress. Her grades slipped to C’s.
This letter of encouragement represents the “misconduct” of Grant’s that his accuser and the court deemed evidence of “imminent” and potentially “irreparable” harm. The letter ends, “Do what you were meant to do. Be the person you were meant to be.”
As Grant charts his relationship, he urged his friend to make “wholesale changes” and was punished for his concern. “I was sharp,” he says, “but only after I had exhausted every other option.”
Houghton is a small town—population around 10,000—and our school has an undergrad student body of about 6,000. Wal-Mart and not much else is a big deal there as the copper and iron mines shut down decades ago driving out industry and families with it. Not surprisingly, we saw each other a lot the second half of my senior year. I saw her at the gym, had class in an adjacent room two days a week, she worked next door to my lab twice a week, and I worked in the same building as her lab.
I stopped by her house because it was a bad situation given the fact the last thing she had said to me were criminal allegations. We talked for hours, getting along enough that I sincerely believed we had patched things up. She was still miserable, though. One thing got her to brighten up like the girl I first became friends with, and that was a goal to go to med school, a reasonable one for a biomedical engineer.
I invited her out to the movies with my housemates whom she was friends with. I said she should come to the surprise birthday party I was helping to throw for a mutual friend. I tried to get her back to the group she was successful with. For that I got another round of false allegations (destroying the front quarter panel of her car).
When a protection order was issued against Grant in 2010, he hadn’t seen his accuser in over a year. The sheriff who notified him of the order “essentially told [him he] had been contacting her, and now [he] couldn’t.” Grant only got a look at the order that he was never served this month (four years later).
The first time I saw it was two weeks ago. It is a permanent file in the Macomb County Courthouse, file #10-2184-PH. I was marked a threat by my government without me present or ever having physical possession of the order. There is no way for me to have the order removed.
Grant’s former friend, the petitioner of the protection order, had gotten a job after college that apparently hadn’t worked out and returned home. In 2013, the office Grant worked in was slated to relocate near her (in a town of 10,000 residents).
I texted her, because I knew that was a problem. Given what she sent back, I replied that I was going to have to seriously consider leaving my job unless I got assurances from her this wouldn’t be an issue.
Grant received actual threats from the family of his accuser but says he has never considered applying for a protection order himself.
Grant’s texts instead inspired his accuser to dash to the nearest courthouse all over again.
In April 2013, she filed another PPO against me even though I had not seen her in over four years. I had made no attempt to try and meet up with her. It was also issued ex parte, probably because of the first one. She began texting me less than three days after it had taken effect and didn’t show up to the appeals hearing that I scheduled. I missed parts of three days of work to fight an order that she didn’t even feel like defending. In two weeks, the same court, Wayne County this time, ruled against me then for me.
What Grant means is the same court that deemed him a “threat” (sight unseen) was content to consider him benign a couple weeks later just because the protection order petitioner didn’t make a follow-up appearance. His observations underscore the cattle-call nature of restraining order adjudications that readily implicate defendants as criminal menaces but may just as readily conclude they’re harmless and send them home.
Mine was not the only PPO to be overturned—far from it—and the entire docket (about 12 cases) was decided in less than 30 minutes after we waited over an hour for the judge, who was late. Is that justice? How can I ever respect the courts again?
The same orders Grant says were summarily dismissed had just as summarily been approved days or weeks earlier. Restraining orders are typically rubber-stamped upon a few minutes’ “deliberation.”
I sued her after that. In her response to my complaint, she admitted that I had never done anything illegal. You wouldn’t know that by my public record.
Grant dropped the lawsuit, which communicated that he wouldn’t tolerate further prosecutions. The 2010 PPO remains on his record, however, and the stain not only galls him but has derailed his life.
The judge who issued the 2010 order, James Biernat, Sr., is famous for presiding over the “Comic Book Murder” case. It was big enough to make Dateline and the other true crime outlets. He overturned a guilty conviction from a jury and demanded a retrial. The action was extraordinary, held up on appeal by a split decision. The Macomb prosecutor publically rebuked him as being soft on crime. That made national news. All the cable outlets covered the second trial, which yielded the same result: guilty. He was rebuked by two dozen jurors, three appellate justices, and the prosecutor. It’s funny, if he had just given me a hearing, let alone a second, I truly believe a PPO would never have been issued.
A questionable judge who is soft on guilty murderers didn’t have a problem destroying a 23-year-old he had never met for non-threatening, legal contact. How could you not believe that the system is hopelessly broken?
Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com
Since this writing, Grant has channeled his thwarted energies into creative writing and completed a novel, The Hopping Bird, which has been praised in Kirkus Reviews: “Harold Freeman enjoyed success as a player, which included a World Series championship, until it was cut short due to injury. His managerial career has not been as smooth, but that is all behind him as he takes the reins of the Toledo Mud Hens for the 2014 season. After a last place finish in the International League’s West Division a season ago, can he turn the team around?”
TALKING BACK to restraining orders 
Anonymous
September 11, 2014
With the above, I would tell the individual to consider getting the PPO expunged/sealed. Get an attorney to do this in order to make it more smooth. It may or may not be possible. If the woman admitted that Grant never did anything illegal, then well enough to ask for expungement or a seal. The respondent has evidence that the PPO was a burden: It caused a financial injury.
There are other recourses, too, such as asking a Governor for a pardon. Getting a pardon should be an alternative. Assuming there were no threats of violence or no signs of abuse (whether or not there was culpability), I don’t understand why an ex parte PPO was issued: Grant wasn’t stealing violence from the government intentionally or unintentionally. The stealing of violence (whether intentional or unintentional via ignorance is no excuse for the law) would have been an “indicator” that a threat existed, thus a judge signing off on a PPO. The David Letterman restraining order is an example of a ridiculous restraining order. HOWEVER, it had allegations of abuse: It’s the allegations of abuse aspect that makes the judges pass off on them. The judges don’t want to see their “power” or “violence” stolen from The State. Let’s hope that David Letterman is not a psionic (I don’t care for his show most of the time).
Something to say, though, is that new evidence often springs up. With new evidence, a person can take a case back to court, especially if he or she was wronged. What that new evidence is or when it will appear is a different story. It may be dependent on a person’s legal knowledge and how much the law revolves around him or her: Perhaps a paranoid metaphysical idea. When ignorance is no excuse for the law and case law is thrown into that idea, the new evidence might exist somewhere in the transcripts of cases after the last hearing, thus becoming new evidence. However, finding that evidence is like finding a needle in a haystack and extremely expensive. It’s like you’d have to be a judge or transcriptionist to find it.
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Anonymous
September 11, 2014
I remember one time going into a court hearing where two people were called up first. Their restraining order case was sealed: I guess there was a motion to seal set for that date. This was while I was fighting off a restraining order. You’re not supposed to be able to do that in restraining order court cases in Illinois. It may be possible to get a restraining order sealed; it may not be. I’ve also observed cases where the restraining order was dropped (but not sealed). Whether or not these hearings are a fabrication by the judge, domestic violence victims counselors, people who’ve been in the domestic violence cases, etc.. (thus it’s all one big rigged show) is something I’ve wondered for a while: Perhaps a paranoid thought. One of the problems with fighting a restraining order case is that ignorance is no excuse for the law. Hard to get around that when a judgement was entered against the respondent. However, I believe there is ignorance of the law by many people: People forget things (at least those without eidetic memory).
However, it’s finding what a respondent was ignorant about that might help overturn a restraining order case. Restraining orders often have to do with allegations of abuse or violence. The thing is, however, that a respondent may not be aware that he or she is or was being an abuser. I guess that’s like saying that a person is being too narcissitic or self-centered to notice his or her actions as being “violent” or “abusive.”
Perhaps it could be best said that a person in a situation where he or she is being alleged to be violent or abusive, where there are alleged acts, that the thing to do is deny culpability. However, where there are abusive acts without culpability, it’s like saying that the person is insane, lacks a conscience, or can’t place him or herself in another person’s shoes (lacks empathy). With that said, it’s that a respondent is hurting someone; and the court is attempting to get the respondent to recognize that he or she is hurting that person. The court may also be considering one or more of those hurting actions to be a form of violence.
As such, I think restraining order cases work to get people to recognize their behavior as abusive or violent, whether or not the alleged abuser knows those behaviors to be abusive or violent.
The next step is recognizing two issues that are better described as “state issues.” These next two issues are as follows: (1) Blame and (2) violence.
(1) Blame is an issue where an individual, person, group, organization, or thing holds something or someone responsible for a particular act and often assumes a level of culpability. When a person blames someone (or considers someone responsible in some synonymous thought processing way) and uses violence against someone, the person is stealing from the state.
And what that person is stealing is (2) violence. Violence is a matter for the state, allegedly (learn about the “monopoly on violence”), to deal out to people. It’s not for individuals in society to deal out (without lawful justification). So, when domestic violence is occurring, especially knowingly, for example, a person is stealing “power” or “violence” from the state.
With that said, violence is a criminal matter not a civil matter. In a criminal matter, it’s the state vs. the individual: Allegedly, the state is to have the monopoly on violence. In a civil matter (civil case), it’s Person 1 (individual) vs. Person 2 (individual). As such, I believe it’s fraudulent and hypocritical of a judge to allow a restraining order case to occur. I consider it a form of barratry. When the case is civil, it’s as though the petitioner is claiming that the respondent stole the power of violence from him or her (the petitioner). That’s ridiculous. It also, however, shows that the petitioner is an abuser (whether he or she knows that or not). I argue that, because (1) I consider the petitioner doesn’t have a monopoly on violence; (2) the petitioner bringing forth the case appears to be committing criminal harassment and/or criminal stalking (depending on state interpretation of harassment and stalking).
So, with the above, it’s like saying that restraining order cases focus on getting a respondent to recognize the following: (1) Stop blaming people; (2) recognize actions as abusive; (3) and stop being abusive. There is also a #4, which may as well be, “If you’re going to blame someone, blame the person in court.” Within the scope of #4, one should consider whether or not an individual is legally liable for an act.
Blame is a more indepth issue. Perhaps it could be said that blame is an irrational behavior in a fatalistic or deterministic world. A person would have to study law, legal compatiblism, various other legal blame philosophies, and so on: A study of the philosophy of blame may bring out an understanding that it may be irrational. People might blame others for things those people did to them in the past. A person might not exactly be thinking of the word “blame,” but a synonymous thought process may be occurring when a person is “blaming” another person and acting against that person. Furthermore, whether or not blame is to be appropriated to a person is a more complex issue. If an individual did something illegal, such as run a red light, the person might be blamed on a strict liability ground. However, if a person blames someone in relation to an action that an individual did to him or her, and if culpability is not explored, then blame (and therapeutic, retributive, restorative, or transformative action) may be misappropriated to an individual. Retributive, restorative, and transformative justice are various kinds of philosophies of justice.
I remember in high school I heard a peer talk about how someone physically attacked him because he left a q-tip in a bathroom. Although the act may have occurred, I doubt the attacker explored whether or not leaving the Q-tip in the bathroom was intentional. In addition, it could be argued that the attacker was stealing power from the state when attacking the alleged q-tip offender. As with #4 I’ve listed, if blame is to occur, then there are legal methods to go about that: Such as in court. With violence, not only is it “stolen,” as one might argue, but sometimes a person fails to explore whether or not culpability existed in the person that violence is being used against.
Regardless of the above, a person could learn all of these things and still commit violence (without lawful justification). The universe works in mysterious ways, and some argue in deterministic ways. It could be argued that a person is fated to be thrown in jail for domestic violence. Accidents happen. People are human rather than programmable robots (radical behaviorism aside). It could be said that any act (actus reus) with culpability (mens rea) was an accident, especially if there is no free will. That is why I consider legal compatibilism to be Darwinian and a fraudulent abuse of power by judges and prosecutors to empower the judges and prosecutors (and not We the People). So, I definitely blame the government for not educating people on violence and for its fraudulent system. Then again, as the tyrants say, “Ignorance is no excuse for the law.”
Now, with the above, I do think restraining order fraud occurs. Fraud is intentionally making up false acts and false claims of culpability. Perhaps the person seeking the restraining order wants the respondent to recognize he or she is being abusive, misappropriating blame, and misuing violence in some manner. Perhaps it’s some search for argumentation in order to resolve problems in the relationship. However, I consider intentionally false allegations of violent act (actus reus) that never occurred to be fraud. Perhaps a petitioner has twisted an event to be similar but not exact: This might be considered a “reasonable person” argument based on evidence (which is still an intentional misrepresentation of fact). For instance, if I recall correctly, I read a case where it was alleged that a defendant placed a note on someone’s car and the defendant was convicted for harassment because of that; the defendant denied the allegation and argued that the note had been placed elsewhere; but the judge argued that because of the circumstantial evidence, a “reasonable person” would argue that the note was placed on the vehicle. Really weird arguments, but it’s based on “reasonable person” allegations.
However, I believe absolutely and intentionally false allegations do occur. As such, a respondent should definitely seek civil remedy through lawsuit (suing for fraud). Furthermore, if a respondent understands the issues of blame and violence as I’ve mentioned above and false allegations of acts have been brought against him or her, then I believe the respondent should sue for fraud.
I have many issues with restraining order cases, especially the Illinois No Stalking Contact Order Act. I’m a firm believer in the freedom of speech. I’ve been a member of at least one organization that focused on the freedom of speech. I don’t like the negligence law, because people are prosecuted for being stupid and ignorant (lacking culpability). Nonetheless, even with the Illinois No Stalking Contact Order Act, the respondent could easily go into court and say, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know my actions were being considered violent or abusive. It was an accident. I don’t mean for it to happen and happen again.” When blame is involved, it could just as well be saying, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know my actions were being considered violent or abusive. It was an accident. I appropriated blame by mistake. I don’t mean for it to happen and happen again.”
That really ought to be enough, especially with the ideas on blame and violence understood as above. There are other issues with restraining order cases, such as no civil discovery being required to check the validity of evidence that a petitioner brings during an ex parte hearing. I really don’t care for that, and it only adds to the barratry.
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Anonymous
September 11, 2014
Mistake: “Their restraining order case was sealed: I guess there was a motion to seal set for that date. This was while I was fighting off a restraining order. You’re not supposed to be able to do that in restraining order court cases in Illinois.”
Correction: “Their restraining order case was sealed: I guess there was a motion to seal set for that date. You’re not supposed to be able to do that in restraining order court cases in Illinois. This was while I was fighting off a restraining order.”
As with #2 listed, it’s difficult to recognize something as abuse: People aren’t psychic. As such, denying culpability is important. What is additionally important is learning not to give “the appearance of abuse.” When that is learned, a person starts to consider the recklessness of his or her actions. It’s the different between wearing a shirt with a nazi symbol because it’s in your closet and its cold outside vs. wearing the black shirt: Putting forefront and considering what others might think ahead of time can prevent the negligence of giving an appearance of having a dangerous character (silence is golden). Ignorance is no excuse for the law; but if you didn’t break the law, deny breaking the law: Deny the actus reus and/or the mens rea.
With #4, perhaps it’s well to consider that the statute of limitations on blaming someone has expired. In a legal sense, you ought to give it up: Discovery may be different for prosecuting criminal issues in contrast to civil issues. With that said, it’s like saying: “Just let it go.” Whether or not there is some naturalistic, metaphysical thing that occurs after the statute of limitations I don’t know. It’s a presumption that what was lost may be restored by Nature if such a legally incompetent person failed to civilly prosecute and the statute of limitations has run out: But this could be an ignorant assumption. Whether or not such occurs, I do not know. But legally, for the civil cases lest a reasonable discovery argument be made, time to let it go. Blaming someone for being unfaithful when the two are not married may be moot and more relativie to social contract theory than any legal liability between the two individuals: However, no-fault divorce may complicate this issue as to remove any sense of liability and accusations of an individual causing the problems in the marriage.
I’ve read stories where people in relationships cause violence to each other due to allegations of cheating or for a desire for retribution for some act. But that tends to be the blame game done outside of court. I’ve written a previous comment somewhere about how I don’t like people constantly bringing their issues to court, and I’ve mentioned that I care more for alternative dispute resolution. Otherwise, there becomes a game of ping-pong. But perhaps it’s well enough to say that some things don’t work out lest people argue, argue, and argue some more. However, from my philosophical background, unless someone knows the Truth, the theory of everything, or some brute fact, arguing becomes kind of pointless. It’s one reason I don’t like arguing. Some people hope to find some truth through arguing. I’ve already made some arguments about solipsism, so meh.
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