[WV] 6'5" Attorney Wilkinson CAN body slam and drop pregnant wife because she slapped him on the arm

Last week, Kanawha County Prosecutor Mark Plants' office dropped domestic battery charges against a [6'5"] Charleston attorney accused of [bruising-up by] throwing his wife, who was eight months pregnant, against a wall and to the ground...

PROSECUTOR DROPS DOMESTIC BATTERY CASE AGAINST ATTORNEY.
Charleston Gazette
By Andrew Clevenger
March 18, 2009
[Excerpts] CHARLESTON, W.Va. - Last week, Kanawha County Prosecutor Mark Plants' office dropped domestic battery charges against a Charleston attorney accused of throwing his wife, who was eight months pregnant, against a wall and to the ground. Charleston police arrested

John Charles "Max" Wilkinson Jr.,

40, at his home on Dec. 2 after a 911 call from his wife, Erica Pulling. According to the criminal complaint filed in Magistrate Court, police found bruising above her right wrist and bicep from where Wilkinson reportedly grabbed his wife, shoved her against the wall and pushed her down on her back... Plants insisted that Wilkinson's case received no special treatment. "What we did was completely ethical and totally by the book," he said. "This is a case just like any other. The evidence [was] not sufficient to proceed. ... All I have is the evidence. She hit him first, and she admits she hit him first." Plants agreed to allow the Gazette to review Wilkinson's case file, which included the petition for an emergency domestic violence protective order submitted by Pulling more than 24 hours after the alleged incident. Pulling, 35, told police that she asked Wilkinson to leave their home temporarily because the stress of their arguing was having an adverse affect on her health. When he continued to stand in front of her, she hit him on the arm, which led to him grabbing her, she said in her victim's statement recorded that morning.
Plants said this week that he received a call about Wilkinson's case that pointed out that Pulling hit her husband first. Plants then reviewed the case and verified the information provided by the caller, whom he refused to identify. "The facts of the case were that she, the victim, was the aggressor, and hit him first... What you have here is an argument between a husband and a wife, and one of them was the aggressor and one of them decided to hit the other one first," Plants said. "You just can't hit people."
Maryclaire Akers, Plants' chief of staff and top deputy, was not involved in the discussion because her husband, J.B. Akers, was Wilkinson's defense attorney, he said. "Maryclaire was completely walled off from the case. She had no involvement whatsoever," Plants said. In her petition for a protection order, Pulling wrote, "As I was leaving the room, I struck my husband on the arm with my open hand." Her husband, a 6-foot-5, 225-pound former National Guard company commander in Iraq, "immediately grabbed me very roughly and threw me against the wall, we struggled and I tried to get away," she wrote. As she tried to leave the kitchen, he threw her to the floor, knocking the wind out of her, she wrote. After he let her go, she ran upstairs to find a phone... [Full article here] [domestic violence, west virgina politics]