Victims’ Images Are a Powerful Reminder of Loss

The families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were a haunting--and important--presence in the courtroom.

Without them attending the preliminary hearing, we might have forgotten there are victims in the O.J. Simpson murder prosecution, dominated as it is by a famous defendant.

The families’ televised images reminded everyone, including prospective jurors, of the loss inflicted on the survivors. Through those left behind, we saw Simpson and Goldman for what they were--a young man and woman robbed of life, rather than figures on a medical examiner’s crude charts. When we saw the parents, we felt the dead could have been our children, or our sisters and brothers.

It must have been torture for the relatives to go through the hearing, particularly on the last day Friday when they heard a medical examiner describe the fatal wounds in cold, clinical language. You wonder how--and why--they did it.

But think for a moment and you might understand their feelings.

Like a growing number of victims, and survivors of victims, they may well have a desire for retribution. Maybe they needed to know the facts of the crime and to close the book on a horrible event.

And like any victims or survivors, they want justice from a huge and complicated court system that often seems unconcerned with individuals. Only by sitting in court, watching the judge and jury, and by speaking up at sentencing and parole hearings can the victims be sure their voice will be heard.

The presence of the families and their power to stir the viewers’ emotions are sure to shape events outside the courtroom. For the Brown and Goldman relatives are the latest examples of a force that has drastically changed California’s criminal law by empowering often-forgotten victims and families.

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It probably began, Prof. Evan Lee of UC’s Hastings Law School told me, when Earl Warren was chief justice of the United States, presiding over a Supreme Court that greatly increased defendants’ rights. “It was the first court to protect defendants’ rights in a vigorous way,” he said. “Before the Warren court, the system was tilted toward the prosecution.”

In California, the attack against defendants’ rights was first led by county district attorneys who were angry over the conduct of the Democratic-controlled Legislature’s Assembly Criminal Procedure Committee. Through the ‘60s and ‘70s, the committee killed scores of prosecutors’ bills designed to weaken the defense side.

Although blocked by the Legislature, then-Gov. Ronald Reagan was able to articulate the feelings of the prosecutors and cops, and of middle-class Californians who were becoming more concerned with crime. His rhetoric took root.

What turned rhetoric into a movement was television, according to Assemblyman Bob Epple, who now chairs a much more conservative version of the Criminal Procedure Committee, the Public Safety Committee. Epple, a Democrat, saw it happen in his district, which includes the working-class and middle-class Democratic communities of Downey, Lakewood, Cerritos, Norwalk and Santa Fe Springs. There, he watched the growth of what became the victims’ rights movement.

“The victims’ families became the focus of television news,” Epple told me. “The victims were always shown on the news. As the people looked at a victim’s family, it was easy to say, ‘That could be me, that could be my children, that could be my neighborhood.’ ”

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By 1982, organized victims’ rights groups existed throughout the state. They were joined that year by a famous grass-roots organizer, the late Paul Gann, who helped them win voter approval of a constitutional amendment called the victims’ bill of rights.

It made many changes in the law, but the major one was to empower victims and their survivors.

It gave them the right to speak when a defendant was sentenced and at parole hearings. Victims and survivors now must be notified of such proceedings. This was a momentous change. In the past, defendants were sentenced, and freed, and the victim never heard of it. The crime was an unfinished chapter in the victim’s life.

The new law made the victim and survivors part of the criminal justice system, with official standing. During this time, victim support groups increasingly urged victims and survivors to attend trials, to be present at all steps in the process.

Empowered, victims continued to organize. Victims’ groups were an important part of the campaign to recall California Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird, whose court overturned 64 of 68 death penalty sentences. The increased penalty measure known as “three strikes and you’re out” is also a product of the victims’ right movement.

“I don’t think there is an end to it,” said Richard Eiglehart, an Alameda County prosecutor on leave while serving as consultant to the Assemby Public Safety Committee. “You will see an active policy-based focus by the different victims rights’ groups for some time to come.”

The Simpson preliminary hearing has ended, but the Goldman and Brown families won’t go away, nor will the powerful cause they symbolize.