Consider another horrible case making headlines this month involving a Charles County woman named Janice Lancaster. Her husband had beaten her to the point that she felt obliged to draw up a will. But the courts were of little help to her. After one particularly vicious incident, her husband pleaded guilty to assault and was given 18 months . . . probation. She subsequently filed for divorce, but after a violent argument in which her husband yelled at her to get out or she wouldn't make it out, she sought help from the local state's attorney's office. He asked a judge to sign an arrest warrant for Mrs. Lancaster's husband, and the judge did so. But the court clerk's office didn't get around to working on the warrant. It went 13 days - over a long holiday break - without being processed, at which point the violent husband - who should already have been served the warrant and been in jail - shot and killed her. (Laws forbidding him to possesses a weapon somehow didn't keep him from getting one.) Then he killed himself. Martha M. Rasin, Chief Judge of Maryland's District Court, called it a "horrible situation," but added that the time lapse was "normal." Think of the court as the U.S. Postal Service without even the late delivery. Law enforcement seems the obvious choice to protect women from assaults, but case law suggests otherwise. In an infamous local case, Warren vs. District of Columbia, two women who heard their roommate being assaulted downstairs called the police for help. The police came but left without entering the building. Again the women called, and this time the police didn't bother to dispatch anyone to the scene at all. The attackers, however, heard the women upstairs and assaulted them too . . . for 14 hours. No police came. The women sued the city, but the courts dismissed their claims saying it was a "fundamental principle" that the government has "no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen."
