Courts can renew protection orders even if neither party lives in state

After a defendant appealed a full order of protection renewal against him, claiming Missouri courts lacked personal jurisdiction over him as a non-resident of Missouri, the Missouri Court of Appeals Western District said on Sept. 21 that the original protection order established that jurisdiction.

Crissy Del Percio of Legal Aid for Western Missouri, who represents the plaintiff K.C. in the case, said the decision prevents a larger fundamental problem for people correctly using orders of protection, since “victims flee all the time,” and so do abusers.

“It cuts off an abuser’s ability to manipulate the system and release jurisdiction from the original home state,” Del Percio said.

Del Percio said that if the court did not affirm the order, no other court could have carried out that protection order.

D. Adam Leatherwood, who is a solo practitioner of Leatherwood Firm, represents the defendant Kent Chapline. He said that they may seek to transfer the case to the Missouri Supreme Court considering Missouri’s recent expansion of protection orders to allow lifelong extensions.

“You could potentially have a situation where two parties have nothing to do with the state, and yet the state can OK an order of protection for life,” Leatherwood said.

In 2018, K.C. was a Florida resident at the time who petitioned for an ex parte order of protection against Chapline, a resident of Texas who rented a Kansas City apartment after he started working for a Kansas City TV station. Previously, they had been having an affair.

Four days prior, K.C. had been visiting the apartment when they began arguing about Chapline’s wife before K.C. alleged that Chapline pinned her face-down on the bed and prevented her from breathing, and blocked her from leaving the bedroom. Chapline testified that K.C. was threatening to call his wife and tell her that K.C. was visiting him in Kansas City, and denied K.C’s allegations.

In 2019, the trial court gave K.C. a full order of protection for a year. Chapline moved out of his Kansas City apartment and filed a lawsuit against K.C. in Texas state court, claiming that K.C. calling his employers had caused him to lose two jobs, and claimed that she falsely accused Chapline of mistreating his son to the police, who made a welfare check.

Two weeks later, K.C. filed a motion to renew the protective order, saying she still feared Chapline. The trial court renewed it for another year in February 2020. Chapline appealed.

Chapline argued that K.C. failed to present evidence at the renewal hearing that he had any contacts with the state of Missouri since the initial order of protection, so the trial court violated his right to due process by issuing the order without having jurisdiction over him, a resident working and living in Texas. He also said that the order forces him “to abandon his Texas Lawsuit or subject him to the imposition of criminal sanctions.”

The Western District agreed with the trial court’s decision, writing that a renewal of an order of protection does not start a new action or new inquiry, and that Missouri courts still have personal jurisdiction over him.

“Thus, because the trial court had acquired personal jurisdiction over Chapline at the outset of this matter — and there is no dispute that it did — it was vested (and remained vested) with the authority to make rulings affecting Chapline in this action,” Judge Edward R. Ardini Jr. wrote in the opinion, “including the power to issue and later renew the order of protection in favor of K.C.”

Both the trial court and the appellate court agreed that there was enough evidence to renew the protection order.

The case is K.C. v. Chapline, WD83881.