Crime Victims Capture Pain on Video for Parole Boards

In her videotape, Patti Hopkins struggles to distill the pain and degradation she has felt since that night 17 years ago when she was gang-raped, shot four times and dumped on the road bloody, naked and paralyzed.

“He’s taken my life,” she tells the camera in chillingly flat tones as she lays motionless in her bed. “I’m living in the hell that he made for me. . . . Keep him in there [prison] or it’ll happen to another girl or woman.”

A hush fell over the room when the 10-minute tape was played for the three-person panel from the Board of Prison Terms that was considering the parole of Hopkins’ main attacker.

The prisoner sat still. He was the gunman who pumped seven bullets into Hopkins and her male companion after the couple refused to have sex so the five attackers could watch.

Even for the parole board commissioners, who are accustomed to hearing tales of violence and depravity, the tape packed an emotional punch.

The panel voted 3-0 to deny parole, and the tape was put back into the file to await the next parole hearing in two years.

“It was very, very powerful,” said Carol Bentley, a former Republican legislator from San Diego County who served as the panel’s chairwoman.

In the evolving tug of war between the rights of victims and the rights of prisoners, videotapes are the latest bone of contention.

To make sure commissioners fully understand the agony of crime victims, the San Diego County district attorney’s office in the past 10 months has asked crime victims and their families to participate in videotaping sessions to supplement the mountains of paperwork that accompany each parole hearing.

The San Diego County district attorney is the only prosecutors’ office in the state that supplies such videotapes to the parole board, said parole board spokeswoman Liz Tanaka. But it is a practice that could easily spread to other areas.

By law, crime victims and their families have the right to speak at parole hearings. But untold numbers opt not to do so.

Many find that the trauma of reciting their pain anew is too unsettling. Others lack the money or time to travel to one of California’s far-flung prisons where parole hearings are held.

And some consider the prospect of sitting only a few feet away from the prisoner who shattered their lives too repulsive to contemplate.

San Diego prosecutors see the tapes as a way for victims to be heard, even if they won’t or can’t attend parole hearings.

“Prisoners have the right to spend years getting spiffed up, getting degrees, polishing their English and becoming poised to present themselves in a different and more favorable light,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Phyllis Shess, who attended the hearing last fall where Hopkins’ tape was shown.

“As prosecutors, we have to make sure the board has a complete view of the prisoner and what he has done,” Shess added. “On behalf of the community, we have to keep that message alive.”

With or without videotapes, the Board of Prison Terms--five commissioners appointed by Gov. Pete Wilson and three appointed by former Gov. George Deukmejian--has a reputation as a hard-nosed group that is reluctant to release prisoners serving life terms. (Six commissioners are retired police officers and two are former Republican legislators.)

The videotapes are so powerful that defense attorneys complain that they are unfair and will lead to unnecessarily long sentences for prisoners who are no longer dangerous and have rehabilitated themselves.

“The question at a parole hearing is not whether someone inflicted terrible loss or horrible pain 15 to 20 years ago,” said San Diego attorney Elisabeth Semel, former president of a statewide organization of criminal defense attorneys. “That’s a given or they wouldn’t be in prison.

“If we keep pounding the emotional hammer, nobody is ever going to be released, and we’ll be spending millions to keep aged prisoners locked up rather than on education or health care or other things. There has to be a rational balancing of interests. As a societal matter, vindication or vengeance of the victims cannot be our No. 1 priority.”

Semel’s viewpoint is not shared by Bentley and other parole board commissioners. They would like to see more prosecutors from other counties submit videotapes.

“A prisoner can be a model prisoner but may have committed a horrid crime,” Bentley said. “We sometimes need to be reminded of the impact of crime on victims.”

The San Diego approach is the envy of prosecutors in Los Angeles County, which has six times as many inmates serving sentences that carry a maximum of life in prison. But Los Angeles has only half as many people as San Diego preparing for parole hearings involving prisoners with life sentences and has no budget for videotaping.

“It sounds wonderful, I wish we had it,” said head Deputy Dist. Atty. Diane Vezzani, who leads a two-person unit preparing for parole hearings. “If you spend a lot of money putting these guys in prison, you should be willing to spend some to keep them there. Any time you have a victim making a statement to the parole board, the prisoner does not get out.”

The San Diego district attorney’s office has long taken an aggressive approach to parole hearings for so-called lifers, prisoners serving indeterminate sentences of up to life in prison. Under longtime Dist. Atty. Edwin L. Miller Jr., the office had a policy of sending a prosecutor to every hearing to argue for a longer sentence, although no law requires such vigilance.

Paul Pfingst, elected to succeed Miller in November 1994, toughened the policy. He approved a proposal by supervising Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Sachs and legal secretary Diane Delaney to establish a four-person Lifer Hearing Unit and to begin videotaping.

The Lifer Hearing Unit also prepares for prisoners sentenced to life without parole and those sentenced to death row--in case there is a change in the law that makes them eligible for parole.

Investigator Theresa Bucaro, a former San Diego police officer, is assigned to locate victims and families who may have left the region. Tapes are also made when victims or families speak at sentencing hearings.

An elderly Oceanside couple, worried that after their death no one would care about the murder of their son in 1991, made an out-of-court tape. So did the sister of a woman who was raped and murdered on Christmas Eve 1977, and the mother of a toddler beaten and scalded to death by her live-in boyfriend in 1976.

“The mother’s tape shows the fact that after all these years the horror of her baby’s death is still there,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert J. Sullivan, who will show the tape Monday at a parole hearing for the killer.

The number of years that a life prisoner serves is determined by a number of criteria, including the minimum set by law, any aggravating or extenuating factors, and the prisoner’s conduct in prison and his degree of remorse and rehabilitation.

Prisoners sentenced to life must serve at least two-thirds of the low end of their sentence before they can be paroled. For someone serving 15 years to life for second-degree murder, that means a minimum of 10 years; for someone serving 25 years to life for first-degree murder, that means 16 2/3 years.

The toughest of all sentences are those meted out under the “three strikes” law. Prisoners must serve 20 years of their sentence of 25 years to life.

Pfingst is anticipating what may be the next innovation in parole hearings: teleconferencing.

Pfingst is installing equipment so that victims and their families someday might be able to sit in a conference room and talk directly to parole board members.

Teleconferencing for parole hearings has been proposed by Citizens for a Safer California, a group whose spokesman is Fred Goldman, father of slain Ronald Goldman. The idea has also caught the attention of legislators.

One reason for the tapes is to counterbalance a tendency by prison counselors and therapists to become too sympathetic with prisoners, said Sachs, who heads the lifer unit.

In the tape made by Patti Hopkins, the camera zeroed in on her clenched and crippled fist and on the waste bag on the floor connected to a catheter. A quadriplegic with a severed spinal column, Hopkins requires the assistance of an attendant to eat, dress and bathe.

Now 40, Hopkins talks on her tape of how the attack dashed her hopes of being a flight attendant. She was 22 and fresh from Ohio when she and her boyfriend were abducted and brutalized.

“I had been hired by United Airlines,” she says. “That was a dream come true. Now all I’ve got is screaming at night.”