Criminal Justice : Victims Find Strength in Numbers

With a handful of volunteers in her Camarillo home and with incalculable rage and frustration over the 1978 murder of her 2-year-old granddaughter, Patti Linebaugh set out to change the way child molesters are viewed and treated.

“It was the only way I knew to fight back for the death of a baby,” she said, explaining why she founded Society’s League Against Molestation (SLAM) after the 1980 conviction of Theodore Frank for the murder of Amy Sue Seitz.

SLAM now has nearly 100 chapters. It has won tougher laws against molesters in California and in half a dozen other states, and there is a television movie about it in the works.

Last year, Linebaugh concluded that SLAM was too large to be run by volunteers, so she turned over its administration to Fundraiser’s Inc. The Arcadia firm runs SLAM’s direct-mail fund raising and does such chores as handling the paper work that will allow the organization to incorporate in all 50 states.

Large, Sophisticated

In short, SLAM is becoming institutionalized. The same thing is happening to many other groups in what has come to be called the crime victims’ movement. What began as assorted groups of crime victims who met with one another for mutual support has grown increasingly large, businesslike and sophisticated.

For example, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the most successful group, moved two years ago from Sacramento to a Dallas suburb largely because it is less costly to travel from there to the East Coast. The move paid off. MADD tripled the number of chapters to about 360 and is expanding overseas.

“We have a good cause,” said Candy Lightner, who founded MADD five years ago after her daughter was killed by a drunk driver in Sacramento. “We need to institutionalize so we can educate people, so we can change laws, so we get drunk drivers off the roads.”

Crime victims’ organizations are soliciting corporations and foundations for donations and are becoming a significant political force. At the same time, their growth and power have generated some controversy and factionalization.

California Activity

Victims and their advocates are particularly active in California, where about 50 bills are pending or have passed in Sacramento that invoke the term crime victim and where a campaign committee called Crime Victims for Court Reform is seeking to oust Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird and two other Supreme Court justices in the November, 1986, election.

Little noticed even five years ago, the movement is finding champions from corporate board rooms to the White House. President Reagan set up a task force on victims in 1982, and last fall he implemented one of the task force’s main recommendations by signing into law the Victims of Crime Act, which allocates $100 million a year to aid victim programs.

Besides the $100-million fund, millions of dollars more are being spent in federal grants. One grant to a nonprofit Los Angeles corporation was used to enlist corporate support for the cause. Clorox Corp., for one, agreed to spend part of its lobbying effort working for victims’ bills.

“It has struck a chord. It’s up there with mom and apple pie,” said Mia Baker, who runs a program in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office that shepherds victims through the court system.

The movement is not without critics. Lynne Henderson, author of an article on the movement in the next Stanford Law Review, believes that the movement is becoming dominated by conservative law-and-order politicians.

Henderson said that as a result, laws against offenders are becoming tougher and sentences longer but that probably victims’ gravest single need--therapy after attacks or the murder of a family member--remains for the most part unmet.

“The changes in the law ostensibly made in the name of victims do very little to address victims’ needs,” said Henderson, an assistant professor of law at Florida State University and former Santa Clara County public defender.

In narrow terms, the movement seeks to afford victims a voice in the criminal justice system by, for instance, securing them the right to speak at the sentencing of people convicted in their cases. Victims also seek government reimbursement for therapy to piece their lives together again and for expenses stemming from crimes.

People in the movement attribute its growth to a variety of factors: increased attention from politicians, a growing public perception that the legal system is more concerned about the rights of defendants than victims and, perhaps most fundamentally, the need by crime victims to strike back at the violence done to them or their families.

“When we lost our child, we lost a big part of our lives,” said Coleen Davis, whose teen-age son was murdered, She is director of the Whittier chapter of Parents of Murdered Children, a support group. “What I do is on behalf of my son.”

Many also say that newspaper and magazine articles and movies made for television have helped stir public interest. The day after the airing of a movie about the stabbing of actress Teresa Saldana and its aftermath, the group she heads, Victims for Victims, received 200 telephone calls.

The movement has had significant successes. In 1982, half a dozen states had laws allowing victims to speak at sentencings or ensuring confidentiality of their addresses or both. More than two dozen states have such laws now. California, which pays individual victims up to $23,000 in compensation, set up the first state victims’ restitution fund 20 years ago. Forty states compensate victims now.

California’s fund, swelled to $36 million by fines levied against criminals, has attracted wide interest in the Legislature, where at least 13 bills deal with it. One, which has wide support, would provide families shattered by a murder with reimbursement for therapy and other expenses.

Another bill seeks to allow hospitals to collect reimbursement for treating victims. The story of that bill, carried by Sen. Newton Russell (R-Glendale), shows how the movement is snowballing.

The bill originated with Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, which is setting up one of the few programs run by a hospital to provide counseling to victims of violent crime.

The hospital got involved at the suggestion of Doris Dolan, who runs Laws At Work, the Los Angeles organization that got the $109,000 federal grant to gather corporate support for crime victims. Dolan, like Russell, is an unpaid member of the hospital’s governing board. Dolan also was one of nine members of the President’s victims’ task force. In turn, the task force called on hospitals to get more involved.

The bill, however, has been stalled by opposition from the state Board of Control, which is in charge of the $36-million restitution fund. A board member charged in a letter to a legislative committee that the bill would undermine the board’s authority by requiring payment based solely on a hospital’s application.

The crime victims’ movement has its roots in the 1950s and 1960s, when liberals pushed to provide victims with restitution. The movement remained liberal-dominated in the 1970s, when feminists began helping rape victims with counseling and demanded changes in laws that humiliated rape victims by often regarding them as potentially willing participants in the crime.

Victims’ groups in the 1980s have branched into new areas, taking controversial stands on how offenders should be punished. Some, for example, strongly advocate capital punishment. That trend troubles some in the movement.

“We would never get involved in that (the death penalty debate),” said Marlene Young, of the National Organization of Victim Assistance in Washington, one of the oldest victims groups.

She said that by “tainting” the cause with such controversy, the movement may lose support for such issues as restitution that affect only victims.

Another concern is that victims who need help would be put off by groups or leaders that take such stands. Parents of Murdered Children, for example, remains apolitical for that reason, seeking only to help parents with peer counseling, said Charlotte Hullinger, who founded the Cincinnati-based group after her daughter was murdered in 1978.

Despite such concerns, crime victims are becoming more involved politically.

“Victims . . . represent a very visible, tangible indicator of what is right and wrong with the system,” said George Nicholson, former assistant attorney general and unsuccessful candidate for attorney general in 1982.

As chief author of the 1982 California initiative known as the Victims’ Bill of Rights, Nicholson was at the fore of the last major political campaign in California identified with victims. The initiative gave victims the right to speak at sentencing, eased the state’s strict rules regarding the admission of improperly seized evidence, limited plea bargains and required stiffer sentencing for repeat offenders.

The next big campaign will be the one to unseat Bird.

Leading the Crime Victims for Court Reform campaign is conservative political consultant Bill Roberts. Roberts, who 18 months before the election is being paid $5,000 a month, was hired by an Orange County prosecutor, an accountant and San Diego hay merchant Don Floyd, whose son was killed by a drunk driver. The three were involved in past anti-Bird campaigns.

Linebaugh has lent her name to Roberts. Her group has traded mailing lists with Roberts to help raise funds for their respective causes. And with the high court’s decision last week overturning the death sentence of Theodore Frank, the man convicted in 1980 of murdering her granddaughter after torturing the baby for four hours, Linebaugh indicated that she would become more active.

Roberts, however, has not been completely successful organizing victims. Actress Saldana, one of the most noted names in the movement, opted against joining after she and Shirley Conley, who helps run Victims for Victims, met with Roberts at his Westwood office a year ago.

This is not to say that Saldana and Conley will stay out of the fray. But if they oppose any of the Supreme Court justices on the 1986 ballot, the stand will be based on their own research, both said.

Saldana has not shunned other political involvement. She set up a coalition with other Los Angeles-area victims’ groups to push for legislation.

“We have to stop this vicious circle,” said Saldana, who testified during this session on behalf of a bill that would increase prison terms for attempted murderers to life from the current term of five to nine years.

“The only way to do this is to become political. . . . It is a matter of parity. Somebody hurts, murders, maims, destroys. We have to see to it that there is adequate punishment.”

Although the victims groups are more involved in politics and have success, some people believe that their effectiveness is limited because they are nonprofit corporations. To maintain their tax-exempt status, they cannot endorse candidates or donate to campaigns. Nor have they hired lobbyists.

In California, MADD has been unsuccessful in getting legislation to impose liability on bars that serve drunk patrons who later cause traffic accidents. The proposal is opposed by liquor interests.

“If you cannot endorse or donate money, you’re never going to get that kind of legislation,” said lawyer Abby Baker, who until recently worked for MADD.

Although such groups cannot lobby or donate to candidates, they can educate legislators by buttonholing them, telling them of their concerns and testifying before legislative committees, Baker said.