The Florida Bar News - September 1, 2010

He wrote the law he uses to prosecute domestic batterers

By Jan Pudlow
Senior Editor

Attempted strangling, even when the victim blacks out, was no different than a poke in the chest.

That flaw in the law bothered Stacy Sharp when he was a deputy for eight years with the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office, where he authored the agency’s domestic violence policy and field training program.

So in 2004 he asked his boss, Sheriff Richard Nugent, if he could work on legislation to fix the statute and help write proposed legislation that would make domestic battery involving strangulation a third-degree felony, instead of a misdemeanor.

“He asked for permission to work on this, and when I said ‘OK’ to him, I really didn’t expect it to happen,” Sheriff Nugent admitted.

“But Stacy is very focused, and once he gets a focus, he is very committed.”

Now, the sheriff calls his former deputy “the driving force” behind the bill Gov. Charlie Crist signed into law in 2007.

Coming full circle, the relatively new law was used successfully by the First Circuit State Attorney’s Office in rural Calhoun County, where Sharp now works as a prosecutor.

“I never set out to write a law,” Sharp said. “But if it was going to get done, I had to do it. I felt we needed a way to better protect victims of domestic violence and treat it more seriously, because it is so potentially lethal.”

Sharp first presented the issue to the legislative delegation for Hernando County in November 2005, educating lawmakers that only five states nationally had a separate statute dealing with domestic battery involving strangulation, and Florida needed one, too.

HB 815 and SB 2150 were well-received in the 2006 legislative session, but time ran out.

Meanwhile, in 2006, Sharp started law school at Florida State University, inspired to follow in the footsteps of the late Lisa Redmon, the first full-time domestic violence prosecutor in Hernando County, who bought Sharp his first study guide for the LSAT.

“The ability to make a difference as a law-enforcement officer is fantastic, but limited. Law enforcement is frequently frustrated when it gets to the prosecution stage and it doesn’t get to where they think it should and they don’t understand why,” Sharp said.

“Lisa had a great perspective, and she understood the limits and reaches of her job. She was a great resource and motivator, and she loved doing her job. When you see someone who loves their job that much, it makes you want that job, too.”

While a student in Tallahassee, it was even more convenient to walk a couple of blocks from the law school to the Capitol to testify at committee meetings and lobby. SB 184 was filed in December 2006, and HB 807 was filed in February 2007. This time, the bills sailed through.

“It was neat to go to law school and talk about laws and statutory interpretation, and now I had a first-hand glimpse of it,” Sharp recalled.

The law he helped write was recently used successfully for the first time in his circuit. A Calhoun County defendant entered a plea of no contest to domestic battery involving strangulation.

The 21-year-old defendant was sentenced to 11 months and 29 days in county jail, followed by five years probation, with the stipulation that he never contact the victim, who is the mother of his infant child. The victim said the defendant grabbed her around the neck and choked her until she blacked out, leaving several finger-shaped bruises. It wasn’t the first time she had been battered, but the first time she mustered the courage to called law enforcement.

Even though the defendant received a sentence comparable to a misdemeanor, Sharp said there is a big difference when the charge is a felony.

“Misdemeanors are treated differently at all levels of law enforcement. By making it a felony, you are telling everyone in the system it is important, and then they start devoting more resources to it,” Sharp said.

Sharp credits Calhoun County Sheriff’s Deputy Jared Nichols for pulling out the statute book and charging the defendant appropriately.

“It was the first time he’d used it, and the first time he’d heard of it,” Sharp said. “I think he did a great job. Because this was a felony, first of all, we were able to negotiate with the court for pretrial confinement. We were able to say, ‘Here is a felony. Here is a photograph. Here is the potential lethality of this offense. But for him letting her go, we could be standing over a dead body.’”

Outside the courtroom, Sharp remains involved in domestic violence issues. He teaches at Florida Coalition Against Domestic Violence conferences about the INVEST Program — Intimate Violence Enhanced Services Team — described on its website as “a unique program designed to provide intensive service management and assistance to individuals identified to be in potentially lethal situations.” In October in Ocala, Sharp will teach about this coordinated community response to domestic violence.

At FSU’s Institute for Family Violence Studies, while a law student, Sharp worked pro bono on the first program to help prevent domestic violence committed by law enforcement officers. Sharp worked on mandatory online training for law enforcement and helped write the curriculum.

“When law enforcement is involved as perpetrators, the lethality skyrockets, because we’ve got guns,” Sharp said.

Institute Director Karen Oehme, a lawyer, remembers Sharp as a nice guy determined to make a difference.

“He was so enthusiastic about the issue of domestic violence,” Oehme said, “and he believes strongly that every element of society should work to end it.”