Everyone knows you can sue a person for damages if they are at fault and run into you in an auto accident.... but what many seem unaware of is that you can also sue them if they injure you intentionally. In fact, if they injure you intentionally, you can also recover punitive damages.
If criminal charges have been filed against the person for the same incident and the person has pled guilty or found guilty after a trial, then it is very easy to get a judgment if you sue them for the injury you suffered. This is because in criminal court it has to be proven "beyond a reasonable doubt" that the person did as charged.... and in civil court all that is required is a "preponderance of the evidence," meaning less proof is required, and because less proof is required, if the person has been convicted in criminal court, then the court handling the lawsuit for damages takes it as "conclusively established" that the defendant did what they were convicted in criminal court of doing -- they are not even allowed to argue that they did not do it.
This means that in the lawsuit for damages, you may not even need to prove that the other person injured you.... but only how much you were injured and how much you should recover for the injury.
Because many divorces involve domestic violence as an underlying cause, the question of whether to address the matter in the divorce, whether to use the divorce case for the purpose of discovery of evidence to use in a later lawsuit for damages, or whether to forget about the issue and move on with your life, needs to be openly addressed with your attorney. If the divorce is to be used for the purpose of getting your spouse to admit the abuse on the record so those admissions in the divorce can be used later, the issue of the statute of limitations becomes more important, since the delay of the divorce may end up causing you to wait more than a year to file the lawsuit for damages, and if you have waited more than a year then the statute of limitations will have run and you can sue.
You also need to consider whether the person who injured you is ever likely to have the money to pay a judgment, because if not, it makes little sense to bring the lawsuit.
Before 1980, such lawsuits against spouses were virtually unheard of, but in the years since then nearly every state has come to allow them, for a wide range of injuries one spouse might cause the other. States have allowed all of the following lawsuits between spouses: assault; intentional infliction of emotional distress as a result of outrageous conduct; infliction of a venereal disease; wiretaps; fraud, interference with custody, and of course standard negligence actions. And there is every reason to believe Tennessee would allow all of the same. At this point it appears that you can sue a spouse for virtually any conduct you could sue anyone else for.
Federal legislation at one time created a civil rights cause of action for spousal abuse under the The Crime Bill Congress passed in the fall of 1994. The statute, formally named the "Civil Rights Remedies for Gender-Motivated Violence Act" of 1994 (sometimes called the Violence Against Women Act, or VAWA) applied to any "gender-motivated" violence serious enough to be a felony, but it's also no longer law -- the United States Supreme Court on May 15, 2000, ruled in the case of United States v. Morrison, http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/99-5.ZS.html decided that the law was unconstitutional, that while it may have been good public policy, Congress did not have the authority to pass the law and any law like the Civil Rights Remedies for Gender-Motivated Act of 1994 needs to be adopted at the state level, and not by the Federal Government
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