WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ASSAULT AND BATTERY IN KANSAS?
Most of the time, the difference between an assault and a battery is did you make contact with the person, did you actually touch them. A battery, most people think that in a battery somebody has a bloody nose or somebody’s got a black eye or something like that. That is not what battery is. Battery is just an unprivileged, unwanted touching. For simple battery, all it takes is contact. You do not have to punch somebody; you can just put your hand on them, push them, poke them with your finger, something like that can be a battery. It obviously goes up in varying degrees. The more harm that you cause to that person, the battery can become elevated from simple battery and it can go to a felony battery and keep going.
There are other different varying degrees of battery as well depending on the person that you harmed like if you make an unprivileged, unwanted touching on a family member, or someone you are in a dating relationship with, then it goes from battery to domestic battery. Another one would be battery on a law enforcement officer. Just because the classification of the person in which you have made contact with, their status can make the crime different. It can change from a domestic battery to a simple battery to a battery on a LEO. Obviously there is a public policy to protect police officers more than there is the average Joe.
I will give you a perfect example of domestic battery. If we are in a dating relationship and I put my hands on you in a rude anger or insulting manner, I have just committed a class B misdemeanor, which is a lower level misdemeanor. It is the same exact situation, but if you are a police officer and you are in the course and scope of your employment and I know that you are a police officer and I put my hands on you; now, I have just committed a class A misdemeanor for which the punishment is double. So it goes from a six months sentence on a class B to a year sentence on a class A.
What Is Domestic Violence Assessment And Batterer’s Intervention?Domestic violence assessment is going to be anytime you have a DV case or a Domestic Violence tagged case is how they call it, usually it is going to be a domestic battery type offense. Before the person can close up the case, whether it is through a plea, whether it is through a diversion or some other mechanism, the state is going to require that a person do a domestic violence assessment. A domestic violence assessment means you sit down with an evaluator, talk to them about your propensity to commit domestic violence.
Basically they score you and say, “This person needs these classes, this type of training to help them not have the same propensity to commit domestic violence in the future.” That evaluation will then be seen by a judge at some point and then whenever a person is either on diversion or on probation, that evaluation, the requirements in that evaluation will be incorporated into their contract for probation, so they will make the person essentially get the treatment as a condition of their probation.
The batterer’s intervention is one of the programs that people will be required to do. I do not know the exact number of hours it is, but it is a schedule of classes that once a person meets a certain level on their DV assessment, they will be required to do a batterer’s intervention program.
Additional Information On Assault, Battery And Domestic Violence CasesOne question that most people will ask all the time is people get confused thinking that the victim or the alleged victim in a case has an impact on the case whether that person is charged or not. People will come in all the time and they will even come in with their spouse that they have supposedly domestic-battered and the spouse will be sitting here saying, “I don’t want this case to go forward”. People get confused at this because of what is attributed to the TV shows. When a cop arrests somebody, they will say, “Are you going to press charges?” So they will ask that person, the alleged victim, “Are you going to press charges?” It is not up to the victim. The victim has no say in whether charges are pressed or not, it is the state that has the determination on whether a person gets charged or not and how far the state wants to go with that.