Welcome to the Judicial Education Center’s (JEC) Domestic Violence Virtual Trial, part of JEC's Interactive Courtroom. You are about to conduct proceedings concerning a case of domestic violence. Before you can begin, you must register and log on.

If you have registered previously and wish to continue with the trial, please just log on. The program will automatically take you where you left off.

The Judicial Education Center’s Domestic Violence Virtual Trial is designed to introduce judges and court staff to issues and challenges that typically arise in civil and criminal domestic violence cases. Reluctant or recanting witnesses, attempts to introduce scientific evidence, requests to enforce protection orders from other jurisdictions, and conditions to impose during release pending trial or in sentencing are a few of the many challenges that arise in such proceedings.

The virtual trial presents video scenarios of attorneys and pro se parties engaged in proceedings that pose these and other problems typically found in domestic violence cases. Each scene is viewed from the perspective of the judge’s bench, and the judge’s own remarks appear as printed text. After some testimony or argument, the judge is called upon to rule, perhaps to sustain or overrule an objection, to grant or deny a motion, to adopt or reject conditions for orders of protection or release pending trial, or to impose a sentence. At that point, each participant is asked to enter his or her ruling. Participants then receive feedback from the program suggesting why their ruling may or may not have been the most appropriate. At the conclusion of the trial, participants who impose sentence may compare their decisions against a compiled summary of their colleagues’ sentencing decisions.

This virtual trial was modeled after JEC’s successful DWI virtual trial, which may also be found on this website at http://jec.unm.edu/dwi. Both are original creations of the New Mexico Judicial Education Center staff.