In many cases where a person is arrested and charged with domestic assault a Court will issue a Domestic Abuse no Contact Order (DANCO) as a condition of release at the first court appearance. Once that’s done, the Complainant (or alleged victim) may then seek and obtain either a Domestic Abuse Order for Protection (OFP) or a Harassment Restraining Order (HRO) as a civil matter.
Assuming one of the civil matters is granted, there are two different court orders prohibiting contact. What if one of the orders allows contact through mediation, early neutral evaluation or some other type of contact? Although the mediation would be allowed in one case, it would not automatically be allowed under the other. While seeking mediation to work out this issue makes a lot of sense and may not violate the “spirit” of the release condition of the other case, typically the criminal case, it would violate the black letter of the order. Therefore, the defendant would be in violation of the release condition on the criminal case if s/he were to have contact with the alleged victim even though the contact is allowed in the other order.
The safest way to approach this would be to have the release condition in the criminal case modified to allow contact for purposes of mediation as allowed in the HRO/OFP. It’s always challenging when there are two different court orders and one of them may allow contact in some form but the other one does not.