Permanent Protection Order (PPO)

Alexis explains: "A criminal protection order only goes away after the entire case is closed. A civil protection order never goes away if it's granted as permanent, unless the people in that protection order, one of them asks to readdress the protection order."

Alexis explains: "an emergency protective order just in regular i say regular but in legal terms that actually is referring to protection orders generally in family law cases so you can get protection orders in criminal cases those are mpos or mandatory protection orders um you can get protection orders by filing them that's a civil protection order or a tpo or ppo and then the epos because we like to have acronyms for everything the emergency protection orders normally are seen in family law cases now we are not a family law firm we are not experts in family law we do have some good resources for that if you're interested in that information but just as a general rule an emergency protective order is normally seen usually in relation to custody issues where if one parent is trying to leave with the kids and the other parent doesn't want them to they can file an emergency protection order saying we need to have this address right now they can't leave the state with my kids"

Alexis explains: "At that civil protection order hearing the judge said, that they were not going to grant the civil protection order to be made permanent because there was not sufficient evidence to substantiate that charge. Now, this is interesting for my client because the burden of proof in a civil protection order hearing is that the judge has to find by a preponderance of the evidence that the issues surrounding the need for the protection order, so usually it's a specific incident, and in this case it was a specific incident alleged, that this incident gave rise to the need for a permanent protection order to be granted."

Alexis explains: "Further, the person then goes and files for a civil protection order. And for the way that a civil protection order works is when they file a motion asking for a civil protection order the judge automatically grants a temporary protection order for a 14 day period. Now, after that 14 day period, the other party comes in and says whether or not they wanna fight the protection order. And then generally what happens is, assuming the other person doesn't also want a protection order to enter against them, which no one ever does, that then goes to a permanent protection order hearing."

Alexis explains: "now you have every right to have a lawyer help you through every stage of this a lot of people come to us after they've been served with a protection order and they will say well i need a lawyer to help me on this can you represent me we can jump in and fight this with you um we also with protection orders we do understand that some people do need protection orders so we also can help people file protection orders um but you can have a lawyer if you go in and you're served with a protection order and you don't know what you're doing you can tell the magistrate hey i need another court date because i need to hire a lawyer to help me with this"

Alexis explains: "now you have to get through a certain number of steps to get a permanent protection order or to prevent a permanent protection order from entering on you"

Alexis explains: "so it is possible to have two protection orders issued against you so you can have the criminal protection order so if you're charged for a domestic violence case and you're put into jail and you're going through the criminal court system you have that mandatory protection order on you from the criminal side but then a victim in a case can also file a civil protection order or request a temporary protection order and then get that protection order made permanent so a person can have two different protection orders for the same thing"

Alexis explains: "So, the terms that lawyers use are in a criminal case, there's what's called an MPO. It's a mandatory protection order. And in a civil case, there's a TPO, which then turns into a CPO, which is a temporary protection order which is then transferred into a civil protection order or a permanent protection order. Now, these are handled by different judges, they're handled by different courts, and there's different processes for getting this done."

Alexis explains: "then they there is a hearing to determine whether or not that temporary protection order needs to be made permanent and in civil cases a civil protection order can be made permanent for a lifetime whereas a criminal protection order like we talked about before um those only last for the duration of the criminal case but a civil one can last forever"

Alexis explains: "way that you can have that lifted is the person who initially requested the protection order they can come back and say okay i it's been a couple of years i'm no longer afraid i'm willing to lift this i don't want it so they can ask for it to be lifted okay or the person who had the protection order issued against them can come back and say hey nothing has happened there haven't been any violations i don't want this anymore can we please get it lifted now for that to happen it has to be at least a two-year period so you can't ask for it to be lifted until two years have passed"