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ous convictions for major violent offenses. Morgan's Law also would allow the courts to determine those special cases in which an electronic monitoring device should be mandated. That location-detection device could alert victims like Myers that their assailant is in close proximity. A similar law was passed in Kentucky recently. • We don't know if such an electronic monitoring system is a fair, practical or constitutional method of handling some protection order petitions. That's a decision for lawmakers to consider, and we urge them to do exactly that in the coming legislative session. • There were 812 protection order petitions filed in Pennington County in 2011 and about 400 to date in 2012. Many of those are routinely issued in divorce cases, and wouldn't require the intense scrutiny that Morgan's Law would require. • But other petitions certainly deserve a closer look by the court system before, not after, tragedy strikes. Every day in America, three women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends. Too often, those women had protection orders in place that (Continued on page 25)
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