Revive the Witness Program

California’s witness protection program is out of money, and the reason why couldn’t be more ironic. The 1998 statute that created it did so by tapping surplus money in the state’s victim compensation program, which is funded by fines and penalties imposed on criminals. This year, for the first time, there is no surplus.

So many crime victims have sought help for medical costs, counseling and other expenses that there is no money left to pay for relocating witnesses. So unless state lawmakers come up with a new source of money specifically for witness relocation, more crimes will go unsolved, more criminals will remain free -- and more people will become crime victims. Some of them will be witnesses who had the courage to testify anyway and paid for it.

The 50% increase in applications for compensation over the last three years is due not so much to a rise in violent crime as to better outreach and the publicity that came from assisting victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The victim compensation program is a victim, so to speak, of its own success. The witness protection program is, unfortunately, just a victim.

Never as elaborate as the federal witness protection program -- known for spiriting away ex-mobsters to new lives with new identities -- the state program nonetheless distributed up to $3 million a year to local district attorneys. The money paid for motel rooms or covered moving expenses and a few months’ rent for witnesses whose testimony was crucial to a conviction but perilous to their own safety.

It is hard to overstate the benefit of witness protection in solving gang crimes. A recent study by the National Institute of Justice found that “the mere fact that a crime is gang-related is often enough to prevent an entire neighborhood from cooperating.” In Los Angeles, police make arrests in only about 30% of gang-related cases.

In its first three years of operation, the state witness relocation plan helped produce almost 500 convictions and a cumulative 6,000 years of prison time. Last year alone, Los Angeles relocated 511 witnesses who otherwise would have been too afraid to testify; most of them worried about gang retaliation.

California is facing a budget shortfall projected to reach $35 billion in the next fiscal year. Even so, Gov. Gray Davis is recommending a $3-million appropriation from the general fund to keep the witness protection program alive.

Yes, the state must make painful cuts. But not ones that mean the difference between life and death.