If a Judge Copies Your Statement Into a Protective Order, Will It Hold Up on Appeal? (Part 1 of 2)

You traveled to court, told the judge your testimony under oath, and walked out with a domestic violence protective order. Then the other side appeals – not by arguing that the abuse you reported never happened, but by claiming that the judge filled out the order incorrectly. Can a technicality like this truly undo your protection?

That was the question at hand in Jay v. Jay, a case that ran from a Durham County, NC, courtroom all the way to the NC Supreme Court. And the answer is reassuring for anyone who has fought for a 50B order – but it comes with a lesson that’s well worth understanding.

Note: Jay v. Jay is a published decision, and in March 2026, the North Carolina Supreme Court affirmed it. That means this decision is binding law in the state rather than a one-off ruling.

What is a Domestic Violence Protective Order (DVPO)?

A domestic violence protective order (DVPO) – also referred to as a 50B order – is a civil order that protects someone from an intimate partner or family member.

Under North Carolina law (N.C. Gen. Stat. § 50B-1), domestic violence is defined as:

• An attempt or intentional causing of bodily injury
• The placing of an individual in fear of imminent serious bodily injury
• Continued harassment that is serious enough to cause substantial emotional distress
• The committing of certain sexual offenses against another

When a judge hears a DVPO case without a jury and determines that domestic violence has occurred, NC law requires the court to write down its findings. These are the specific facts that support that order – and it’s in those specific documented facts that Jay v. Jay lived.

What Happened in Jay v. Jay?

In this particular case, the wife filed for a DVPO against her husband. In the filing, she attached a written statement describing violent, non-consensual sexual contact and incidents of ongoing verbal abuse.

The court granted an emergency order that same day and set a hearing on the one-year order. At the hearing, both parties testified. The judge found that the wife had proven her case and entered the one-year DVPO.

But rather than compose his own findings, the judge took a different route. He took the wife’s written statement and crossed out the parts that the testimony didn’t directly support. He then initialed the changes and attached that marked-up version to the order as “Exhibit A”, his findings of fact.

The husband appealed. But his argument wasn’t that the abuse his wife had testified to didn’t exist. Instead, he argued that the judge broke the rules by using the wife’s words as the court’s findings, rather than writing his own – and that the DVPO should be dropped.

How Does a Judge Need to Make Findings?

North Carolina’s Rule 52 requires a judge in a non-jury case to “find the facts specially”. The judge must spell out the key facts that they used to make their decision. This documentation allows an appeals court to check the reasoning, should an appeal be filed.

The husband claimed that the judge in Jay v. Jay skipped that part of his job and instead rubber-stamped the wife’s unverified testimony statement.

One Court of Appeals judge agreed with the husband in dissent, calling the initial judge’s action an improper shortcut. By adopting a party’s written allegations as the court’s own findings, the DVPO was entered with incorrect documentation – and the case should have been sent back for a redo.

Our next blog will cover what the Appeals Court decided and the ramifications of that.