COLUMBIA, SC (WBTW) – Gov. Nikki Haley signed a bill into law Tuesday afternoon that’s aimed at reducing the number of people killed by domestic violence in South Carolina. The new law creates domestic violence fatality review committees in each of the state’s 16 court circuits.
When someone dies as the result of domestic violence, the solicitor where it happened will pull together a committee to look into the details. Gov. Haley says, “This is pulling in forensics, this is pulling in law enforcement, this pulling in prosecutors, this is pulling in everyone to find out how did we go from start to end, and how is there a death, and what could we have done different?”
She says South Carolina was one of only nine states that did not have something like this. South Carolina also has been for years one of the worst states in the nation for the number of women killed by men in domestic violence situations.
Sen. Larry Martin, R-Pickens, says, “I think every one of us can look around and know about a case that we’ve known about ourselves and we wondered, well why didn’t somebody say something? Or why didn’t we, why didn’t the community know that this situation was about to boil over to this level?”
The state has had for years a child fatality review committee that looks at the circumstances surrounding children who die of something other than natural causes. Laura Hudson, a member of that review committee, says it has helped. “Being able to look at a death and go backwards, then perhaps we can do some tweaking in what we do in order not to have a fatality,” she says.
