Crime Victims Want City to Open Office for Them

Several victim’s rights groups joined forces Tuesday with a mayoral candidate to ask the San Diego City Council for funds to establish a crime victims office.

If approved, the office would direct crime victims to the appropriate agency for legal assistance and psychological counseling.

Representatives of the groups said the office is needed because victims often do not know where or whom to call for help when they become a crime statistic.

The victims rights advocates joined Councilman Ron Roberts, a candidate for mayor, in asking the council to appropriate $86,000 to establish an office to serve as an umbrella organization for the various groups.

“Most of us are out there like Don Quixote, fighting windmills,” said Sam Knott, whose daughter Cara was murdered by California Highway Patrol Officer Craig Peyer.

Knott spoke of his family’s frustration in trying to find an organization that would give them psychological and legal counseling after their daughter was slain in 1986.

“Nobody really knows where to start” looking for assistance, said Detective Steve Baker of the San Diego Police Department, Baker’s son, Michael, was murdered by Robert Alton Harris in 1978. Harris was executed April 21 in the California gas chamber.

Baker, who wore a lapel pin in the shape of a hangman’s noose, said “there is no way to bring victims into the process.” He complained that the California attorney general’s office never contacted him during the 14 years that Harris fought a legal battle to avoid execution.

Besides the $86,000 in city funds to establish an office, Roberts also asked the City Council to establish a toll-free telephone line crime victims can call when looking for counseling.

Roberts also said police should hand out cards with the toll free number to crime victims.

Criminal defense attorney Elisabeth Semel said victims of crimes “experience very real pain, grief and suffering.” However, Semel said she does not want the victims’ “personal pain to replace my client’s constitutional rights” at trial or sentencing.

“Nobody is saying that defendants shouldn’t be punished for crimes they commit. . . . But these groups have held everybody hostage. They want to use the system to vindicate their personal pain and want major social problems cured by the resolution of their individual cases,” Semel said.

“Because we cannot get inside them or feel their pain, we have to pay for their suffering. And the price we are paying is the erosion of our constitutional rights,” Semel added. “They don’t just want restitution and a voice, they literally want to undermine the criminal justice system.”