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He pitched her clothes outside. Then, in a drunken rage, he slammed the door on her hand and punched her in the eye with enough force to turn her face purple and swollen.

When she walked into the emergency department at Toronto Western Hospital shortly after the attack, the alarmed staff who tended to her injuries promptly notified police.

And yesterday, standing before a judge in courtroom K of Toronto's Old City Hall, shoulders slumped with the hangdog look of a man who has done something wrong, Paul O'Hara, 35, pleaded guilty to a charge of assault causing bodily harm in the battering of his former live-in girlfriend in July.

With a little prodding from his lawyer, Mr. O'Hara apologized in a deep, gravelly voice to Ontario Court Judge Jeff Casey for his crime in a speech that seemed rehearsed.

Describing the sentence as "lenient" in light of what police photographs showed to be a vicious beating, the judge sentenced Mr. O'Hara to 18 months probation and ordered that he have no contact with his former girlfriend, possess no firearms for five years, register in an accredited spousal-abuse counselling program and seek treatment for alcohol abuse.

This is the small-time drama of K Court, the popular name for a small blue courtroom tucked into a corner of Toronto's bustling Old City Hall courthouse. It is one of eight courts in Ontario dedicating to trying cases of domestic violence.

Nearly four years after K Court began as a pilot project intended to convict more abusers in a manner less arduous for their court-shy victims, every working day the docket is full of accused spousal abusers pleading guilty or standing trial.

The province has invested millions of dollars to open new domestic courts and hire new Crown attorneys with expertise in domestic violence. By September, Ontario plans to have 24 courts up and running around the province.

It was a motley crew of accused abusers who paraded before the judge in K Court yesterday.

Postponed was the case of Rob Erwin, a man already serving jail time on charges of forcible entry, mischief under $5,000, assault and theft under $5,000, arising after he broke into his girlfriend's home a few weeks ago and attacked her.

While there is a new domestic-violence court in Oshawa, Ont., it played no role in sparing the life of Gillian Hadley a few kilometres down the road in Pickering. After enduring months of terror, Ms. Hadley was shot by her estranged husband this week after he repeatedly violated bail conditions, turning up on her doorstep several times to threaten her.

Her death, which carries the potential of becoming a watershed event in the battle for more protection for abused women, has fixed public attention on the failure of a justice system that issues thousands of peace bonds every year that are all too seldom enforced.

The domestic-violence courts are the exception. While statistics measuring their performance are scarce, there is some evidence that the courts' push to register first-time offenders in spousal-abuse intervention programs has cut the rate of repeat offences.

And the courts' outreach work with victims, who are notoriously prone to recant testimony against abusive spouses, has bolstered the chances of women showing up in court, which is leading to more abusers being convicted.

"Anecdotally, I think it's working. I think that we're reaching more victims," said Laura Silver, the head prosecutor on the K Court domestic-violence team. "We're gathering better evidence in these cases. We're getting more co-operation [from victims]and we're losing less victims as a result of better management of these cases."

But women shying away from testifying are still hampering efforts to convict abusers in the new courts.

Mr. O'Hara's former girlfriend never appeared in K Court yesterday, and she has ducked every effort police have made to serve her with a subpoena.

Without a co-operative victim, and no other evidence to prove his guilt, Ms. Silver, the prosecutor on the case, says she would never have secured Mr. O'Hara's conviction were it not for his guilty plea.

"This case was going nowhere," she said. "I had nothing on him."

While police have become more rigorous in gathering domestic-violence evidence, and videotaping victims' testimonies more often immediately after the assaults, all Ms. Silver had was pictures of a battered and bruised woman who arguably could have sustained her injuries independent of Mr. O'Hara's fists.

"In my view, given the difficulty with proof that we had, we got a fair result in this case."

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