During a West Virginia divorce, a common question of who actually gets to come into the courtroom often comes up. The answer can vary from state to state, but in West Virginia, the way it works is simple. The people that are allowed to be in the courtroom are the judge, attorneys, the husband and the wife getting divorced, the court staff and anyone who’s going to be a witness in the proceeding and testifying.
Generally, nobody else is going to be allowed in the room as far as the divorce proceeding is concerned. Now in domestic violence protective order proceedings, that’s a little bit different. There are other persons in select instances that can be present. For example, there’s a person who’s known as a domestic violence advocate who’s there in support of the person who’s filed the petition. However, with a divorce proceeding, a very limited number of people who can actually be present in the courtroom exist. Some other states can have totally different rules.
In West Virginia, the divorce proceedings are considered to be closed. Often, to even get a copy of the court transcript, you have to get special permission from the judge to actually get that transcript. If that is the case, a lot of times you have to sign an affidavit basically stating that you’re not going to release the hearing tape to anybody outside of the courtroom. The one reason for this is because people were taking the videos of divorce proceedings and they were posting them online. That’s not going to be permitted at all because a divorce proceeding is considered to be a confidential proceeding. This applies to whether children are involved or not.
