Charged With Domestic Violence in California: What Happens Now

Last reviewed: August 2026

Someone was arrested. Maybe you. The police came, somebody went to jail for the night, and now there is a court date and a piece of paper saying you cannot go home. This page explains what actually happens next, in order, in plain language. It is written for the person facing the charge, but if you are the other person in this case, read it too. Almost nobody explains this part to either side.

Read this before you do anything else: do not contact the other person. Not a text, not a call, not through your cousin, not to say sorry.

If a judge signed a protective order, that order restrains you. It does not restrain them. So if they call you, and you answer, they broke nothing and you broke a court order. That is a brand new crime under Penal Code 273.6, and it is the single most common way a manageable case turns into a serious one. “They contacted me first” is not a defense. Neither is “we worked it out.”

The short version

Most California domestic violence cases follow the same path:

Arrest, then a night or two in custody. Domestic violence arrests usually mean an overnight, not a release with a ticket.
Arraignment, usually within a couple of court days. You hear the charge, you plead not guilty, and the judge sets bail or releases you.
A protective order gets signed the same day. Sometimes it says stay completely away. Sometimes it allows contact, just not negative contact. Which one you get matters enormously to your life.
Months of court dates while your lawyer gets the police reports, photos, and recordings.
Most cases end in a plea, not a trial. For a first-time misdemeanor, that usually means probation, a year-long batterer’s program, fees, and community service. Not prison.

The part that surprises people most: whether the other person wants to “drop it” does not decide this. That decision belongs to the district attorney. We wrote a whole guide on that, because it is the question we get more than any other: can the victim drop domestic violence charges in California?

There are two main charges, and yours matters

California has two everyday domestic violence charges. They sound similar. They are not.

Penal Code 243(e)(1), “domestic battery.” This is the lesser one. It covers any willful, unlawful touching of a partner. No injury is required. None. A shove, a grab, a slap that left nothing behind, throwing a drink. It is a misdemeanor only. The maximum is a $2,000 fine, up to a year in county jail, or both.

Penal Code 273.5, “corporal injury.” This one requires an actual injury, and it is much more serious because it is a wobbler, meaning the DA can charge it as either a misdemeanor or a felony. As a felony it carries two, three, or four years in state prison, or up to a year in county jail, or a fine up to $6,000, or a combination.

The word “injury” in 273.5 is far weaker than people assume, and this is where most people misread their own case.

Penal Code 273.5(d) defines “traumatic condition” as a condition of the body, such as a wound, or external or internal injury, whether of a minor or serious nature, caused by physical force. Minor counts. A red mark counts. A small bruise counts. You do not need stitches, a hospital, or a broken anything.

The same subdivision spells out that strangulation and suffocation are included, and defines them as impeding someone’s normal breathing or blood circulation by applying pressure to the throat or neck. Hands on a neck is treated as an injury case even if there is not a mark. Prosecutors charge these hard, and juries hate them.

Read more: the exact elements, the relationship lists, and how the two charges differ on paper

Penal Code 273.5(a) punishes a person who “willfully inflicts corporal injury resulting in a traumatic condition” upon a covered victim. Broken into its parts, the prosecutor must prove:

The act was willful, meaning on purpose. It does not require an intent to injure, only an intent to do the act.
It inflicted corporal injury, meaning bodily injury.
The injury resulted in a traumatic condition as defined in 273.5(d).
The person injured was in one of the relationships listed in 273.5(b).

The 273.5(b) relationship list:

(1) A spouse or former spouse.
(2) A cohabitant or former cohabitant.
(3) A fiance, or someone the offender has or previously had an engagement or dating relationship with, using the definition in Penal Code 243(f)(10).
(4) The mother or father of the offender’s child.

Penal Code 273.5(c) adds that you do not have to hold yourself out as someone’s spouse for the law to call it cohabitation. Living together as more than roommates is the idea.

Penal Code 243(e)(1) covers battery, which California defines as any willful and unlawful use of force or violence on another person, committed against “a spouse, a person with whom the defendant is cohabiting, a person who is the parent of the defendant’s child, former spouse, fiance, or fiancee, or a person with whom the defendant currently has, or has previously had, a dating or engagement relationship.”

A textual difference worth noticing. The 273.5 list expressly includes a former cohabitant. The 243(e)(1) list says “a person with whom the defendant is cohabiting,” and separately lists a former spouse and a former dating relationship, but does not say former cohabitant. If your case involves an ex you used to live with but were never married to and never dated in the way the statute describes, that wording is worth having your lawyer look at closely.

“Dating relationship” is defined in Penal Code 243(f)(10) as “frequent, intimate associations primarily characterized by the expectation of affectional or sexual involvement independent of financial considerations.” Courts have read this to require something more than a couple of dates, and less than a formal commitment.

The practical difference between the two charges. 243(e)(1) is a misdemeanor, always. 273.5 is a wobbler, so the same conduct can follow you as a felony. That is why the fight in a lot of these cases is not “did anything happen” but “was there an injury,” and why photographs taken the night of the arrest matter so much.

A related charge you may see instead of or alongside these: Penal Code 273.6, violating a protective order. That is its own misdemeanor and it is charged constantly, because people contact each other.

What happens in the first week

The arrest. California police treat domestic violence calls differently from other calls. If officers see signs of a recent injury, somebody is usually going to jail that night, and it is not up to the person who called.

An emergency protective order. Officers can get one from an on-call judge at any hour. It is short, it usually runs a handful of days, and it exists to cover the gap until court.

Arraignment. This is your first court date. You are told what you are charged with, you enter a plea (almost always not guilty at this stage), the judge deals with bail or release, and the judge issues a criminal protective order. If you have never been to an arraignment, we have a separate walkthrough of what happens at an arraignment.

Something happens before your arraignment that almost nobody knows about. Under Penal Code 273.75, in a domestic violence case the prosecutor has to run a search of your history through criminal databases, including prior domestic violence, other violence, weapons offenses, and any restraining order against you from any court, civil or criminal. That information is handed to the judge to consider when setting bail or deciding whether to release you. The statute also tells the court to consider the safety of the alleged victim and their children in that decision.

In plain terms: the judge at your arraignment already knows more about your record than you expect, and a restraining order you forgot about from three years ago is in front of them.

The protective order, and whether you can go home

This is the question that actually consumes people. Where do I sleep tonight. Can I see my kids. Can I get my tools.

At arraignment the judge issues a criminal protective order under Penal Code 136.2. In a domestic violence case, the court is required to consider issuing one on its own motion, whether or not anybody asks for it. That is the statutory design, and in practice an order issues in the large majority of these cases.

But the terms are not one-size-fits-all, and this is the part worth understanding. Penal Code 1203.097(a)(2) describes the mandatory order as one protecting the victim from further acts of violence, threats, stalking, sexual abuse, and harassment, and then says the order may contain residence exclusion or stay-away conditions “if appropriate.” Those last three words are doing real work. The no-violence core is mandatory. The move-out and stay-completely-away pieces are discretionary.

That is why two people charged with similar things get different results. One gets a full stay-away and is sleeping on a couch across town. The other gets an order that allows contact and goes home. In San Diego that lesser order is called a no negative contact order. It means you can have contact, just not the bad kind. Which one you get is decided fast, at arraignment, by a judge who has a few minutes and a police report.

What actually decides which order you get

More than anything else, it depends on how the prosecutor frames the case. The judge is working from a police report and from what the DA says that morning. If the DA presents the conduct as serious, the order will be strict. That is why the part that matters happens before the judge ever speaks. It is your lawyer getting the prosecutor to see the incident in context. Get the DA on board and the conduct looks smaller. Fail to, and the judge has only the report.

Be honest with yourself about the odds. Judges rarely give a no negative contact order unless the conduct was very minor. That is the real pattern, and most people asking “can I go home” are asking for the exception rather than the rule.

Two things people get wrong here:

Being close with your kids helps, but not the way people think. It carries some weight. It also cuts the other direction. If children were around when this happened, the judge gets more careful, not less. Raising your children as the reason you need contact also raises the stakes in the judge’s mind.
The alleged victim speaking up for you can help, and it can hurt. It depends entirely on what comes out of their mouth. Someone who steps up and describes that night in more detail than the police report did has just made things worse. And this is not something to arrange. Contacting that person about the case can violate the order you were just handed, and it can be charged on its own as witness intimidation. If they want to be heard, that goes through your lawyer and the court, never through you.

Whatever the order says, follow it exactly, and read it before you leave the building. People walk out with a piece of paper they have not read and violate it within a day. Common examples: going back for clothes without a civil standby, replying to a text, showing up at a child’s school event that the order covers, or being at an address the order lists.

If the order is wrong for your situation, the answer is to ask the court to change it, through your lawyer. It is not to decide on your own that it does not really mean that.

Read more: how long the order lasts, and how it can be changed

During the case. The order issued at arraignment under Penal Code 136.2 generally runs while the case is pending.

At sentencing, if you are convicted, a second and longer order can issue. There are two different provisions here and they carry two different maximums, which a lot of sources get wrong by quoting only one:

Penal Code 136.2(i)(1): on conviction of a domestic violence crime, the court at sentencing shall consider a restraining order barring contact with the victim, and that order “may be valid for up to 10 years, as determined by the court.”
Penal Code 273.5(j)(1): on a conviction under 273.5(a) specifically, the sentencing court shall also consider a restraining order, and that one “may be valid for up to 15 years.”

Both say the court shall consider issuing one, and both let the judge pick the length. The Legislature said the length should turn on the seriousness of the facts, the probability of future violations, the safety of the victim and their immediate family, and the record information gathered under Penal Code 273.75.

Can it be modified? Yes. Penal Code 136.2(i)(1) says the order “may be modified by the sentencing court in the county in which it was issued throughout the duration of the order.” Penal Code 273.5(j)(2) has its own route: on a written petition by the prosecutor, the defendant, or the victim, the issuing court may modify or terminate the order for good cause, provided all three are given at least 15 days’ notice before the hearing.

Note who is on that list. The victim can petition. The victim asking is not the same as the victim deciding, and judges do not rubber-stamp these, but the statute plainly contemplates the request.

Two more features of these orders that catch people. First, while a Penal Code 136.2 order is in effect you are prohibited from owning or possessing firearms, and you have to relinquish what you have. Second, a criminal court protective order takes precedence in enforcement over a conflicting civil court order. So if you also have a family law order or a restraining order from another case that says something different, the criminal one controls. If you are dealing with a restraining order on the civil side too, our guides on domestic violence restraining orders and what to do when you are served with one cover that track.

What a realistic outcome looks like

Here is the honest answer for a first-time misdemeanor case with no serious injury: probation, a long class, money, and community service. State prison is not the realistic outcome. Neither, usually, is a long jail sentence.

What is not optional is the package that comes with probation. Penal Code 1203.097 says that if you are granted probation in a case where the victim fits the Family Code 6211 definition, the terms “shall include all of the following.” That word is the whole story. These are not things a good lawyer talks the judge out of.

Probation for at least 36 months. Three years. It can be summary (informal) probation.
A criminal protective order protecting the victim.
A batterer’s program, weekly, for at least a year. Sessions run a minimum of two hours each.
At least $500 paid into a domestic violence fund. Reducible or waivable if you truly cannot pay, but only after a hearing in open court.
Community service, amount set by the judge.
Booking within one week of sentencing, if you were not already booked.
Notice to the victim of how the case ended.

Everyone calls it “the 52-week class.” Here is what the statute actually says, because the difference matters if you are counting weeks.

Penal Code 1203.097(a)(6) requires successful completion of a batterer’s program “for a period not less than one year,” with “weekly sessions of a minimum of two hours class time duration.” Attendance has to be consecutive, with no more than three excused absences for good cause across the entire program, and the whole thing has to be finished within 18 months unless the court finds good cause to change that.

So it is a year of weekly two-hour sessions, which in practice programs run as 52 weeks. You also have to file proof of enrollment with the court within 30 days of conviction under 1203.097(a)(10)(B). That deadline is missed constantly, and missing it is an avoidable problem.

Read more: the full probation package, jail minimums for repeats, and what happens if you fail the program

Program fees and inability to pay. Penal Code 1203.097(a)(7)(A)(i) requires you to pay program fees “based upon the ability to pay,” and (a)(7)(A)(ii) says probation terms are not lifted until reasonable fees owed to the program are paid in full, though probation cannot be stretched past the limit in Penal Code 1203.1(a), and the court may reduce or waive fees on changed circumstances. Separately, 1203.097(c)(1)(P) requires each program to use a sliding fee scale, lets an indigent defendant negotiate a deferred payment schedule with a nominal fee, and requires the court to waive even that nominal fee if it finds after a hearing that the person cannot pay it. If money is the reason you are about to fall out of compliance, say so on the record early. The statute has answers. Silence does not.

What the program is and is not. Penal Code 1203.097(c)(1)(G) requires the program to exclude couple counseling and family counseling. People show up expecting to work on the relationship. That is not what this is, and asking for it will not change the requirement.

There is no provision letting a judge skip the program. This is worth being blunt about, because people ask constantly. Nothing in 1203.097 gives the court an “interests of justice” escape from ordering the program itself. The only flexibility in the text is the substitute where no batterer’s program is available, and good-cause modification of the consecutive-attendance rule or the 18-month completion window. Compare that with Penal Code 243(e)(3), where the court can decline the 48-hour mandatory minimum jail on a repeat for good cause. That good-cause escape hatch reaches the 48 hours, not the class.

Failing or being kicked out. Under 1203.097(a)(9), if the program decides you are unsuitable it contacts probation or the court, which either recalendars the case or refers you to a different program. Under (a)(12), if the court gets a report of unsatisfactory performance, no benefit from the program, or criminal conduct, it holds a hearing as a priority calendar item to decide whether further sentencing should proceed. If it makes any of those findings it terminates your participation and proceeds with sentencing. Translation: getting thrown out of the class puts your original sentence back on the table, quickly.

Extra sessions. Under (a)(10)(A), if the program recommends it, the court “shall” order additional sessions across the probation period unless it finds that would not serve the interests of justice, states its reasons on the record, and enters them in the minutes.

Mandatory jail if you have priors. This is where it stops being a paper sentence.

Penal Code 273.5(h)(1): one prior conviction within the previous seven years for an offense listed in 273.5(f), and probation must include at least 15 days in county jail.
Penal Code 273.5(h)(2): two or more such priors in seven years, and the minimum is 60 days.
Penal Code 273.5(h)(3): the court may find good cause not to impose that jail, and must state its reasons on the record.
Penal Code 243(e)(3): on a domestic battery where you have a prior 243(e) or 273.5 conviction, probation includes not less than 48 hours in jail, again subject to a good-cause exception.

Higher exposure on a repeat 273.5. Under 273.5(f)(1), a 273.5 committed within seven years of a prior conviction under 273.5(a), 243(d), 243.4, 244, 244.5, or 245 carries up to a year in county jail, or two, four, or five years in state prison, or both imprisonment and a fine up to $10,000. Under 273.5(f)(2), where the prior is a 243(e) within seven years, the range is two, three, or four years in prison or up to a year in jail, with a fine up to $10,000.

Payments in place of a fine. Both statutes let the court order, instead of a fine, payments to a domestic violence shelter-based program up to $5,000 and reimbursement of the victim’s counseling costs, after determining your ability to pay. See Penal Code 273.5(i) and 243(e)(2). Note that this substitutes for a fine, not for the separate $500 fund payment under 1203.097(a)(5).

Guns

This is the consequence people underestimate the most, and it is permanent in one common scenario.

A misdemeanor conviction under 243 or 273.5 costs you firearms for 10 years. Penal Code 29805(a)(1) lists both sections. Possessing a firearm in that window is itself a crime, punishable by up to a year in county jail or by state prison, plus a fine up to $1,000.
A misdemeanor 273.5 conviction on or after January 1, 2019 has no 10-year cutoff at all. Penal Code 29805(b) is written separately and says a person convicted on or after that date who “subsequently” possesses a firearm is guilty of a public offense. No end date. This is the one that shocks people.
A felony conviction means an open-ended ban. Penal Code 29800(a)(1).
You also lose guns while a protective order is in effect, before any conviction, under Penal Code 136.2(d).

The gun consequence is a reason to care which section you plead to, and it is a reason to raise it with your lawyer before the plea, not after. A plea to 243(e)(1) and a plea to misdemeanor 273.5 can feel identical in the courtroom. One is a 10-year firearm prohibition. The other, for convictions from 2019 forward, has no expiration under state law.

There is also a federal ban, and it runs separately from the state one. Under 18 U.S.C. 922(g)(9), a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence bars you from having a firearm. A later California dismissal does not clear that ban. Federal law does make an exception for an expungement, at 18 U.S.C. 921(a)(33)(B)(ii). But the exception only counts if the state relief gives gun rights back. California’s does not, and says so directly in Penal Code 1203.4(a)(2). So the federal ban survives.

If firearms are part of your job, tell your attorney at the first meeting. Not at sentencing.

Can this come off my record later?

Partly, and it is worth doing, but be clear about what it fixes.

Both 273.5 and 243(e)(1) convictions are eligible for dismissal under Penal Code 1203.4 once you complete probation. Neither appears on the exclusion list in 1203.4(b). That relief is real: you withdraw the plea, the case is dismissed, and you are released from most penalties and disabilities of the conviction.

What it does not do:

It does not give you your guns back. Penal Code 1203.4(a)(2) says so directly.
It does not cancel an unexpired protective order. Penal Code 1203.4(a)(4) says orders issued under 136.2(i)(1) and 273.5(j) stay in full effect until they expire or the court changes them, despite the dismissal.
It does not erase the conviction for a later case. The prior can still be pleaded and proved in a future prosecution.
It does not end your duty to disclose in response to a direct question on an application for public office, for licensure by a state or local agency, or for contracting with the California State Lottery Commission. That is in 1203.4(a)(1).

Two procedural notes. The prosecutor gets 15 days’ notice of the petition under 1203.4(d)(1). And unpaid restitution cannot be the reason a court denies you.

Our full walkthrough is here: how to get your record expunged in California. Worth knowing before you get there: a domestic violence record makes some other record-clearing tools harder. Sealing an arrest under Penal Code 851.91 is normally close to automatic, but domestic violence is one of the categories where a pattern in your history pushes you into the judge’s discretion instead.

If there are children involved

This is the consequence that outlasts everything else, and it lives in family court, not criminal court.

Family Code 3044 creates a rebuttable presumption that giving custody to a person found to have committed domestic violence within the previous five years is detrimental to the child. The presumption can only be overcome by a preponderance of the evidence, and the court has to make specific findings.

Here is the part that connects the two courtrooms: under Family Code 3044(d)(1), a criminal conviction within the previous five years for a crime against the other party that fits the Family Code definition of domestic violence satisfies the finding requirement, and the statute names Penal Code 243(e) and Penal Code 273.5 specifically.

So a misdemeanor plea that feels like a manageable outcome in criminal court can arrive in family court as a presumption against your custody. Among the factors listed for rebutting it: successful completion of a batterer’s program meeting the 1203.097 standards, compliance with probation and any protective order, and whether there have been further acts of domestic violence.

If you have children and a custody case, or you might, tell your criminal lawyer that at the first meeting. It changes what a good outcome looks like.

A plea that is fine in criminal court can be a disaster in family court. The two systems do not consult each other, but the second one reads the first one’s paperwork.

What we see in real cases

The protective order violation is the wound people give themselves. The underlying case is often weak, contested, or headed toward a good resolution, and then there are 40 phone calls from the jail or a string of texts, and now there is a second case that is much easier for the DA to prove than the first one. Phone records do not have a memory problem.
Enroll in the program before anyone orders you to. If probation is realistic in your case, you are going to do the class anyway. Walking into a disposition already 12 weeks in changes the conversation. It is the same logic that works in DUI cases, where showing up with proof you took it seriously reads as insight instead of damage control.
Photographs from that night decide 273.5 versus 243(e)(1). The whole felony-versus-misdemeanor question can turn on whether a mark showed in a photo taken at 2 a.m. Get your lawyer the discovery request out early, and if you have your own photos from that night, preserve them and do not edit or crop anything.
Getting discovery early always helps and never hurts. The same rule applies here that applies in DUI cases. You do not know what is in the file until you read it, and something in it may be the thing that changes the case. Private counsel is often slower precisely because they obtain and actually read it. That is thoroughness, not delay.
Judges take these cases seriously and decide fast. How you present matters more here than in almost any other misdemeanor. Be early, be respectful to court staff even if the day is going badly, and wait your turn to speak. Our short guide on how to dress and act in court is worth ten minutes before your date.
Keep your feelings out of the courtroom. The other person in this case knows exactly which button to push, and on a bad day they are sitting twenty feet away. If you react, the judge stops evaluating the police report and starts evaluating you.
Hire local if you hire. The statutes are statewide. Practice is not. How a particular county’s DA charges these, what that office will and will not reduce, and how a specific bench handles protective order modification are all local knowledge, and that is most of the value you are paying for.
The prosecutor is the audience, not the judge. This is the counterintuitive one. On the questions that decide your life here, the order terms and the charge level, the judge is mostly reacting to what the DA hands them. Time spent getting the DA to see the incident in context does more than anything said at the podium.

What the DA is thinking, and what “reduced” really means

Prosecutors treat domestic violence differently from nearly everything else in the misdemeanor world. A first-time DUI gets a fairly standard offer. A first-time domestic violence case does not. DAs take these very seriously, and the reason is that they are thinking about a next time.

So understand what you are asking for when you ask about a reduction. Getting a charge knocked down, a felony 273.5 to a misdemeanor or a 273.5 to a 243(e)(1), realistically takes two things at the same time:

It has to be a first offense. Not a first conviction. A first anything.
There have to be real mitigating circumstances, meaning specific facts that put the incident in context rather than just explain it away.

One without the other usually is not enough. A first offense with nothing else to say about it is still a domestic violence case, and it gets treated like one.

Do not count on diversion. In these cases it is mostly off the table, and that catches people completely off guard.

Diversion is the arrangement where you complete a program and the case gets dismissed with no conviction. California has a general misdemeanor diversion law, Penal Code 1001.95, and it is unusually generous. A judge can offer it even over the prosecutor’s objection. But subdivision (e) carves out three categories, and the second one is “any offense involving domestic violence,” using the definitions in Family Code 6211 and Penal Code 13700(b). Both 273.5 and 243(e)(1) land inside that. The judge does not have the option.

Prosecutors have moved the same direction on their own. In the counties we practice in, DA offices have stopped offering informal diversion in these cases at all. The stated reason is worth hearing, because it explains the whole posture: they want the person to complete the domestic violence course, and they want something on the record, so that if there is a second incident the system knows about the first one.

There is one narrow exception worth knowing about, and almost no consumer page mentions it. Mental health diversion under Penal Code 1001.36 is a separate program with its own exclusion list, and domestic violence is not on it. Read subdivision (d): the barred offenses are murder, voluntary manslaughter, most registerable sex offenses, and a couple of others. Domestic violence is absent. That does not make it a way out. It requires a qualifying diagnosis that played a significant role in the offense, a treatment plan, and a judge who agrees, and the court can make you show eligibility and suitability first. It is a real door in the right case and a closed one in most. Ask a lawyer whether your case is the right case rather than deciding from a web page.

What all of this means is that the goalposts are somewhere different than you expect. In a lot of misdemeanor cases the plan is to make the case go away. Here the realistic wins are usually the level of the charge, the terms of the protective order, and keeping the collateral consequences narrow. That is a reason to start early, not a reason to give up. It is also why walking into a disposition already well into the class matters so much: the thing the DA says they want, you can hand them before they ask.

Do I need a lawyer?

For this one, yes. That is not the answer we give on every page. Record clearance is a good do-it-yourself project. A domestic violence charge is not.

Three reasons. The felony-or-misdemeanor decision on a 273.5 is made early and is worth fighting over. The protective order terms decide where you sleep and whether you see your children, and they are set at a hearing that lasts minutes. And the collateral consequences, guns, immigration, professional licenses, and family court custody, are mostly invisible from inside the courtroom and are permanent in a way the sentence is not.

If you cannot afford one, ask for the public defender at your arraignment. Say it out loud, in court, on the record. Do not plead to anything at your first appearance because it seems like the fast way out of the building.

This is general information, not legal advice. If you are in danger, call 911. Talk to a California attorney about your situation.