Victims in the Criminal Justice System

13 September

• In victim-witness, there are 3 people just on domestic violence, 1 on sexual assault of children/child abuse, one on sexual assault of adults, 4 on general adult stuff, and a couple others. They get about 300 in intake per year (the generalists, anyway).
• There are new changes proposed to chapter 950.
• Think about how victims get informed of their rights and what it means to you when a police officer gives you some documents about your rights.
• Steve Dureen: director of NAVA. Lots of experience advising legislator, etc.
• National Crime Victims' Law Institute: good info from their web site, including paper topics.
• Question at issue now: how can you be a victim before someone is convicted of a crime? That's scary because we haven't been getting that question for about 30 years. There's a societal interest in public safety, and that means we want people to cooperate in prosecutions as witnesses. So there are mutual obligations between the state and victims.
• 1968 omnibus crime control and safe streets act: a major overhaul, and innovative in that never before had we thought feds would help out states with crime control.
• vroh.akron.edu: Victim Rights Oral History. See interview with Jo Kolanda about starting a victim-witness unit. A lot of this ("project turnaround") dealt with just figuring out that people were losing their jobs because they kept getting subpoenaed to go to court, and lots of counts were getting dismissed because a witness didn't show up.
• Expanding victims' rights into the post-conviction phase is a newer development; chapter 950 was enacted in 1980.
• Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will, started a major awakening that led in WI and other states to a review of how we treat women in the criminal justice system. 1975: the legislature creates sexual assault as a crime (used to be just a "crime against morality").
• Chapter 950 was the nation's first bill of rights for victims.
• Note that there's a difference between a victim-witness person at a DA's office and a counselor working at a non-profit (confidentiality, e.g.: what if the victim says something that could be exculpatory)? They play by some different rules.
• There's 1 county (Forrest) that doesn't have a victim-witness program. But it's not clear that they're all doing a great job: there's no real audit.
• 950 was revised in the 1990s, and one of the proposals was to exempt judges from § 950.11, and this change was not adopted. That's pretty interesting: the penalty has never been imposed on anybody, but we explicitly decline to exclude judges, which is interesting.
• 1993: constitutional amendment. Of course just amending the constitution doesn't give you any interpretation (i.e., caselaw) of the new language. Note that "rights" don't appear in that amendment (just opportunities, privileges, etc.).
• WI has the broadest definition of victim of any state. Companies and governments can be victims.
• The crime-victim rights board is a quasi-judicial body that has the power to issue reprimands, and (at least in theory) seek equitable relief. See § 950.09. It can't overturn a verdict or sentence, however.
• It's still an open question in WI whether victims have standing to enforce their rights. In other words, is the crime-victim rights board the exclusive remedy? Pending legislation would address this.

---

• Susan Robertson: UWLaw alum, social work MA, victims' services.
• 950 is the requirement, not the maximum. Dane County is pretty committed to victim services.
• Sometimes you have instances where people are both victims of one another (i.e., both have been charged).
• Tour of the handouts.
• Some victims are so regularly victimized (e.g. Shopko gets a lot of bad checks) that they sign onto a waiver list for notification about events in cases involving certain crimes.
• Retail theft is a tricky thing: usually this isn't a crime, but rather an ordinance violation (i.e., it's dealt with by a ticket). And if there's no "crime," there's no victim.
• In theory, some rights attach the moment a crime occurs, but other rights arise later.
• There are case decline letters as well (putative victims are notified if a felony isn't charged).
• A victim impact statement should not rehash the crime, but rather say how the crime has affected you. So talk about ways your life is different.
• 10,564 victims in 2010, 1K witnesses. <-- Susan's office's workload.
• A lot of her job is understanding what people are really afraid of (e.g., driving downtown) to facilitate their participation, also setting realistic expectations about timeline and outcome.
• Law Enforcement is probably the #1 witness pool.