Prop. 115: Right to Privacy and Crime Victims’ Reform Act

Proposition 115, “The Crime Victims’ Justice Reform Act,” sounds good, doesn’t it? But it isn’t. It is a very dangerous bill and should be defeated.

The authors probably started out with good intentions. After all, we all want justice for victims of crime. We all want to see criminals punished.

So why is this a bad bill? Because, somewhere along the line, someone slipped into the fine print the provision that our right to privacy, guaranteed to us under the California Constitution, shall be eliminated. The advocates of this bill try to claim that only “criminals” are supposed to have their rights taken away under this bill so that these “criminals” can be punished quickly under federal guidelines. Unfortunately, that is not what the bill says. The language of the bill does not distinguish between “criminals” and the rest of us.

If our right to privacy is taken away under California law, we will have no right to privacy at all because there is no right to privacy under federal law. There can be no justice for crime victims, or any of us, if we lose our right to privacy in the process!

RUTH L. McCLUSKEY

Modesto