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The bigger questions in the Galanos case
Press-Register (Mobile, AL)
January 1, 2005
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The bigger questions in the Galanos case By hillyer THE SEEMINGLY lenient disposition of a domestic violence case against former Mobile County District Attorney Chris Galanos raises broader questions about how such cases should be handled as a matter of course.
All too often, it seems, domestic offenders are allowed to escape being found officially "guilty" of criminal wrongdoing.
Police arrested Mr. Galanos on Sept. 17 after he reportedly broke out a glass door at the home of his ex-wife and shouted threats at her and their adult daughter. It was the third time in about two decades that Mr. Galanos had been arrested, with one of the previous charges also involving a home break-in. Both of the earlier charges were dropped.
In the current case, prosecutors last month agreed to defer action in lieu of a sort of informal probation combined with a court-supervised assessment of whether Mr. Galanos has a substance-abuse problem.
The deal allows the court to force Mr. Galanos into treatment if such a problem is found, and requires him to "stipulate" that the state could likely prove its case against him if it went to trial.
But if Mr. Galanos completes a domestic-counseling program, prosecutors said they may drop the charges.
The Register editorial board's inquiries on the subject found that Mr. Galanos did not appear to be a beneficiary of favoritism. Broadly speaking, the severity of his sanctions falls in the middle range of how such domestic cases are usually handled in Mobile.
What is more troubling isn't that Mr. Galanos specifically may get no "guilty" verdict (or plea) on his record, but that so many such cases are handled without official findings of guilt.
For several good reasons, the same actual sanctions - counseling, probation and the like - are surely far less effective at deterring similar acts of domestic violence if they are not backed by a legal verdict of guilt than if they are instead part of an indelible criminal record.
That's the conclusion reached in a 2004 book called "The Criminal Justice Response to Domestic Violence," written by former Quincy, Mass., probation officer Andy Klein, who holds a doctorate in criminal justice.
"If you don't have a 'guilty' verdict-, you have nothing," Dr. Klein told the Register this week. "As long as you treat domestic violence as lesser than other violent offenses, what you are saying is that there is no crime. ... It's a bluff, and the defendant knows it."
Studies by the National Institute of Justice in 2001 and 1996 found at least modest evidence that arresting domestic offenders helps deter them from future offenses, and that "the continuing threat of legal sanctions evidently has a stronger deterrent effect than the actual imposition of a sanction through the arrest process alone-. ... Deterrence ultimately results from the actions of prosecutorial and judicial actors whose actions lead to substantial punishment."
Dr. Klein noted two particular ways that counseling without a formal finding of guilt falls short of effective deterrence. First, he said that most states have "elevator" clauses in their criminal justice statutes that significantly increase the penalties for multiple offenses. If there is no official guilt, those clauses won't automatically kick in if the defendant offends again.
He further noted that, compared to other misdemeanor offenders, domestic abusers show an "extremely high" rate of recidivism. While it might be a good idea to send them to counseling, he said, it helps to have available the "stick" of the multiple-offense statutes if the counseling alone fails to deter future violent behavior.
Second, Dr. Klein cited the federal Violence Against Women Act, in which the so-called Lautenberg Amendment prohibits anybody found guilty of domestic violence from owning a firearm.
Obviously, if there is no formal guilt, the Lautenberg Amendment doesn't apply - and for the victims of any subsequent offenses, it might mean the difference between life and death.
None of which is to say that Mobile's prosecutors and judges intend to make light of domestic violence. There is much to be said for their efforts to respond to such cases with sureness and dispatch. Municipal court sets aside most Wednesdays specifically for domestic violence cases, and the city prosecutor's office has specialists in that field.
But Register inquiries found that the combination of dropped cases and "diverted" cases such as the Galanos one leaves only, by very broad estimates, about a third of all "first offender" arrests that lead to guilty verdicts.
This compares, according to Dr. Klein, to about a 70 percent conviction rate (or better) in cities such as Everett, Wash., Omaha, Neb., and San Diego.
For all these reasons, and because of the growing statistical evidence that domestic violence is a major national problem, it would behoove Mobile and surrounding communities to secure "guilty" pleas from first-offenders - even if, along with such a plea, the actual sanctions assessed for it lean more toward treatment (at least for lesser violence) than toward harsher punishment.
JURY SELECTION IN KILLINGS TO BEGIN
Richmond Times-Dispatch (VA)
February 7, 2005
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Jury selection in a federal death-penalty trial of a man who killed two James Madison University students in 1996 is scheduled to begin in Abingdon today.
Brent K. Simmons, 31, was convicted seven years ago of shooting to death his former girlfriend, Ann M. Olson, 25, and her boyfriend, Keith J. O'Connell, 23.
Because the state's case was based entirely on circumstantial evidence, Simmons was able in 1998 to reach a plea agreement in which a capital-murder charge was reduced to two second-degree-murder convictions. He could be out of prison by 2015.
However, federal authorities last year decided to pursue a death-penalty case against Simmons after a diver swimming in a lake near Simmons' hometown of Carlisle, Pa., found a 9 mm Smith & Wesson like the one used in the double homicide.
A federal grand jury indicted Simmons in March on two counts of using a firearm in murder and on an interstate stalking count. The charges were brought under the federal Violence Against Women Act, which means Simmons could face the death penalty if convicted.
The trial, scheduled to last three weeks, was moved to Abingdon because of media coverage the killings generated in Harrisonburg.
KILLER STALKED WOMAN, PROSECUTOR SAYS
DEFENSE DENIES PROSECUTOR'S CHARGE THAT JMU STUDENT WAS SIMMONS' EX-GIRLFRIEND
Richmond Times-Dispatch (VA)
February 10, 2005
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A federal prosecutor opened his death-penalty case against former James Madison University student Brent Simmons yesterday by telling jurors Simmons was an enraged stalker who killed his ex-girlfriend and her boyfriend because he feared losing control of her.
"You will hear testimony of great anger, and you will see evidence of great violence," U.S. Attorney John Brownlee promised jurors in U.S. District Court in Abingdon, previewing the case he will lay out over the next two weeks. Simmons pleaded guilty seven years ago in a Harrisonburg court to killing two JMU students, Ann M. Olson and her boyfriend, Keith J. O'Connell, in October 1996.
The federal government's purpose in retrying Simmons is to seek a jury's permission to put him to death. He is charged with interstate stalking and two counts of using a firearm to commit murder. Because the charges were brought under the federal Violence Against Women Act, jurors could call for the death penalty if they convict him.
Yesterday, Brownlee said Simmons' obsession with Olson led him to drive 12 hours from his home in Orlando, Fla., to Harrisonburg to kill Olson and O'Connell when he learned the two were dating.
Simmons, 31, is currently serving a 20-year sentence for the double homicide.
Yesterday, defense attorney Chris Kowalczuk conceded to jurors that Simmons killed Olson, 25, and O'Connell, 23, but he disputed the contention that Simmons was stalking an ex-girlfriend. He told jurors that, though the pair's relationship was contentious, neither had ended it. After Simmons graduated from JMU in May 1996 and moved to Florida and Olson started seeing O'Connell, she called Simmons 27 times, Kowalczuk said.
"We have phone records, and you'll see those phone records," he promised jurors.
Brownlee told jurors a witness will testify that Simmons confronted O'Connell and Olson in July 1996 when he found her at O'Connell's apartment, and left after saying that "Keith better watch his back." Olson filed a complaint against Simmons following the incident but later dropped it when he promised to leave her alone.
In 1998, after Simmons' capital-murder trial ended with a hung jury, state prosecutors agreed to a plea bargain in which Simmons pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder. Prosecutors accepted the agreement largely because their case was circumstantial and they could not find the murder weapon -- a 9 mm pistol.
In November 2000, though, a diver swimming in a lake near Simmons' hometown of Carlisle, Pa., found the 9 mm Smith & Wesson semiautomatic pistol that Simmons had bought two months before the double homicide. Yesterday, Brownlee said ballistic tests show it was the gun used to kill Olson and O'Connell.
Victim's Roommates Testify About Past
Daily News-Record (Harrisonburg, VA)
February 11, 2005
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ABINGDON -- Brent Simmons' defense attorney Chris Kowalczuk is trying to bring the past into the present.
During testimony on Thursday, Kowalczuk tried twice to bring information from Simmons' 1998 Rockingham County Circuit Court trial into the federal courtroom.
Judge Samuel Wilson denied Kowalczuk's requests, but did tell the jury there was a previous trial and that it should not interfere with their decision in the current one.
Simmons, 32, of Carlisle, Pa., is charged with interstate stalking and two counts of using a gun to commit murder. The charges by the prosecution were brought under the federal Violence Against Women Act, therefore jurors could call for the death penalty if they convict him.
The state was unable to convict Simmons of the murders of Ann Olson, 25, and Keith O'Connell, 23. That bit of information could be used by Kowalczuk to sway the jury into believing the federal prosecution doesn't have enough proof to convict Simmons.
After a hung jury in Simmons' capital murder trial, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and is serving a 20-year sentence for the killings.
However, the prosecution's case thus far has been strong. That hasn't gone unnoticed by Wilson.
"The facts against [Simmons] are so overwhelmingly bad that it's hard to deal with … I understand," Wilson told Kowalczuk.
Knife Under The Pillow
Kowalczuk's efforts weren't entirely unwarranted. Testimony by three federal witnesses gave the attorney a bit of daylight by referring to the past trial or case against Simmons.
Damian Walke, one of Olson's roommates in 1996, testified that he had been sleeping on the couch of their apartment with a knife under his pillow. Walke said that the front door's deadbolt did not work, because the doorjamb was bent. He said he slept with the knife under his pillow as a "precaution" in his 1998 testimony.
Kowalczuk thought this was enough to allow him to delve into that trial, but U.S. Attorney John Brownlee disagreed. Wilson supported Brownlee, saying that Walke's action showed that the circumstances between Olson and Simmons had deteriorated to such a level that he "had good reason to sleep with a knife under his pillow."
Walke began sleeping with a blade after Simmons was spotted outside the apartment Olson shared with Walke, Aimee Brillhart and Stephanie Newsome.
Brillhart testified that she passed by Simmons on the stairway up to the apartment after coming home from her shift at Spanky's at 3 a.m. one night. She said seeing Simmons at the apartment at that time of night made her "uncomfortable," especially because he was not "supposed to be there." Simmons said he was just leaving a note for Olson, but when Brillhart got to her front door she didn't see anything.
At that time, Simmons' relationship with Olson was on the rocks, Brillhart said, and the two were often arguing. The encounter Brillhart spoke about also was mentioned in Newsome's testimony.
Newsome said that night she heard the doorknob of the front door of the apartment jiggling. However, when she went to check to see what or who it was, Brillhart walked in.
Investigator Mentions Trial
Kowalczuk made a second attempt to dig up the past when retired Harrisonburg Police investigator Al McDorman mentioned Simmons was arrested in 1997.
"The jury knows [Simmons] was arrested in light of the other preceding," Kowalczuk said.
But again, Wilson denied his request, only saying he would inform the jury that there was in fact another trial before the current one.
Diver Testifies About Finding Gun In Lake
Daily News-Record (Harrisonburg, VA)
February 12, 2005
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ABINGDON -- When David Kessler, a Vietnam War veteran, went diving on Nov. 5, 2000, he didn't expect to find a crucial piece of evidence in a murder case.
Kessler, 57, of Tamaqua, Pa., took up scuba diving in 1979 when he retired from the federal government. An amputee, Kessler dives using a prosthetic fin.
Kessler met a group of fellow divers at Pine Grove Furnace State Park, a 40-minute drive south from Carlisle, Pa. Pine Grove Furnace State Park is home to Fuller Lake, where prosecutors say Brent Simmons went after killing Ann Olson and Keith O'Connell on Oct. 12, 1996.
Wearing a plum suit, Kessler took the witness stand Friday and explained how he found a 9mm, semiautomatic Smith & Wesson on the bottom of Fuller Lake. Prosecutors believe the gun, which carries the same serial number as one Simmons bought Aug. 23, 1996, is the one Simmons used to kill Olson and O'Connell.
Simmons, 32, of Carlisle, Pa., pleaded guilty to the killings in state court and is serving 20 years for both deaths. Now, federal prosecutors have charged him with interstate stalking and two counts of using a gun to commit murder. The charges were brought under the federal Violence Against Women Act. If convicted, Simmons could face the death penalty.
Saw Something Shiny
After donning his diving gear at a nearby picnic area, Kessler waded into the lake, once the site of an iron-ore furnace, that was designated a park where large coves were filled in with water.
The water temperature was about 42 degrees, said Kessler, who mentioned he was equipped with temperature and depth gauges.
As Kessler started on his dive, he began swimming out across from the picnic area, which juts into the lake like a peninsula. Kessler then circled back to where he entered. There, he noticed the glint of a metal object.
"I saw a shiny object and thought it was a spoon or a utensil that someone threw into the water," Kessler said.
Kessler swam underwater toward the shiny object, which, shown on a diagram that Kessler drew, was near two sawed-off tree stumps. When Kessler reached for the object, he noticed part of it was stuck in the lake's bottom. After pulling it free, he realized it was a gun.
"When I pulled it from the mud, I saw that this was no kid's cap gun, that it was the real thing. It said Smith & Wesson on it," Kessler said.
Kessler said the shiny part that he saw was the barrel of the gun and that the butt was buried in the mud. He retrieved the gun at a depth of 44 feet.
After securing it in an inflatable bag, Kessler swam straight up and went to shore. He noticed the magazine was still in the gun's handle.
Bullets Found At Scene
Records indicate that Simmons purchased a stainless steel semiautomatic 9mm from a sportsmen's shop in Dillsburg, Pa. The shop's owner testified Friday that he helped Simmons during the purchase. He also said that he knew Simmons' father, Samuel, who owned several firearms.
After the bodies of Olson and O'Connell were found in O'Connell's apartment at 230 N. High Street, investigators recovered five bullets and five cartridges in various areas throughout O'Connell's bedroom. They also recovered a bullet in the basement, beneath O'Connell's room.
Autopsy reports show that O'Connell was shot twice in the head, with one bullet entering just above the right ear and exiting through the left top portion of his head. This bullet was recovered by Harrisonburg Police investigator Danny Rothwell near a window toward the back of O'Connell's bedroom.
Olson also was shot twice, with both bullets entering the left back portion of her head and exiting into the loveseat where she was found with her face buried in her hands. Prosecutors argue that Simmons entered the room and shot O'Connell first, which caused Olson to hide her face in horror.
The bullet found in the basement was one that missed, going through the arm of the couch and passing through a hole in the floor.
Roanoke-based firearms examiner Richard Van Roberts said there wasn't enough evidence to say that the bullets found at the crime scene were fired from Simmons' Smith & Wesson. However, he did say the cartridge casings that were recovered matched the gun that was recovered from the lake.
Simmons' defense attorneys did not cross-examine Van Roberts or Kessler Friday. They are expected to begin presenting their case Monday.
Prosecution Rests Case Against Simmons
Daily News-Record (Harrisonburg, VA)
February 12, 2005
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ABINGDON -- Federal prosecutors concluded their death-penalty case against Brent Simmons on Friday, offering evidence that Simmons was at the scene of the murders the night they happened and that he asked about them before they were publicized.
The prosecution, which presented evidence starting Wednesday, depicted Simmons as a disturbed individual who went to great lengths to kill James Madison University students Ann Olson and Keith O'Connell.
Olson, 25, and O'Connell, 23, who were dating, were each shot in the head twice at 230 N. High Street on Oct. 12, 1996.
Simmons is serving a 20-year sentence for the murders after pleading guilty to second-degree murder in state court. The plea came as part of an agreement with Rockingham County prosecutors following a trial that ended with a deadlocked jury.
At the time of the trial, a murder weapon had yet to be found, and DNA evidence was not recovered from the crime scene. According to witness testimony, there is still no DNA evidence, footprints or fingerprints that show that Simmons was at O'Connell's apartment, but investigators recovered the gun used in the murders in November 2000.
That recovery led to the current charges, filed in federal court.
Simmons, 32, of Carlisle, Pa., is charged with interstate stalking and two counts of using a gun to commit murder. The charges were brought under the federal Violence Against Women Act, which allows jurors to call for the death penalty if they convict him.
Neighbor Puts Simmons At Scene
Testimony at the end of this week placed Simmons at the High Street apartment where the students were killed.
On Oct. 12, 1996, Bobby Rogers finished his bartending shift at Pargo's restaurant in Harrisonburg. Rogers, a Mount Jackson native who now lives in Fort Collins, Colo., lived in the apartment behind O'Connell's.
On Thursday, Rogers testified that he received a call from his girlfriend telling him to come home. Rogers, now 35, said that was an unusual request.
As Rogers pulled his Jeep into the driveway alongside his apartment, he saw O'Connell outside, arguing on his front porch with a "light-skinned black man or Asian male." It was about 2:23 a.m.
"When I pulled in, I glanced over and noticed the two of them engaged in an animated discussion," Rogers said.
A short time later, after Rogers had settled into his apartment, he heard two "loud bangs." After his girlfriend asked if he had heard the noise, Rogers looked out his window, which is about 15 to 20 feet from O'Connell's bedroom window. Rogers said he didn't see anything and went to sleep.
Later that day, Rogers was watching television when he noticed a girl hysterically running down the driveway with a telephone. That girl was the girlfriend of O'Connell's friend, Robert Jorgensen. She was on the phone with 911 dispatchers. Jorgensen, who was in town for the weekend, stopped by O'Connell's house after attending a James Madison University football game and found O'Connell and Olson's bodies in O'Connell's bedroom.
The time was about 4:30 p.m.
Harrisonburg Police investigated the killings Saturday evening, but did not release any information about them until Sunday evening.
Simmons' Phone Calls
Prosecutors' evidence shows that Simmons liked to talk on the phone. In fact, it was one way Simmons kept track of Olson during their on-again-off-again relationship.
According to evidence presented this week, Simmons called his sister in Frederick, Md., Friday, Oct. 11, 1996, to tell her he would visit over the weekend. Simmons also said that he wanted to borrow her car to visit Olson later that weekend. Simmons arrived at his sister Tammy's house, but not until 5 a.m., Oct. 12.
Later that morning, at about 7:44 a.m., Simmons called friend Dwayne Jackson, who lived in Harrisonburg with his wife, Sandra Frey, according to phone records and court testimony. Jackson testified Friday that he didn't recall talking to Simmons at that time, but did say he talked to Simmons on Sunday, Oct. 13.
Simmons then called a boyhood and college friend, Melvin Paul Perry. Perry, a graduate of Bridgewater College, was staying in Maple Heights, Ohio, at the time. Phone records show that Simmons called Perry at 4:53 p.m. Oct. 12. In that conversation, Simmons told Perry that Olson had been murdered.
On Sunday, Simmons called Jackson again, and this time he wanted information.
"He asked if I had heard of anything big happening in Harrisonburg," Jackson, 43, testified. "I said 'no.'"
Simmons then told Jackson to watch the 6 p.m. news.
At about 6:15 p.m., Simmons called Jackson again to ask if he had seen anything. Jackson told him that he saw that Olson had been killed. Jackson testified that Simmons said that was "messed up," but that he didn't seem upset about it.
"His voice was cold and distant," said Jackson.
Over the next few days, Jackson said, Simmons called and asked Jackson to read newspaper articles to him.
The defense will begin its rebuttal on Monday. Attorney Chris Kowalczuk is anticipated to focus on the relationship between Simmons and Olson, as well as Simmons' character before the killings.
GUILTY
Daily News-Record (Harrisonburg, VA)
February 15, 2005
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ABINGDON - After 3½ hours of deliberation on Monday, a jury found Brent Simmons guilty of two counts of premeditated capital murder and interstate stalking.
The decision comes after a full week of a federal trial. The jury will meet today to decide whether or not Simmons gets the death penalty.
During the reading of the jury's verdict, Simmons, 32, of Carlisle, Pa., sat staring straight ahead. He showed no emotion as he was handcuffed and escorted out of the courtroom by U.S. marshals. Meanwhile, Simmons' mother "Pepsi" sat quietly with her hand held over her mouth. Family and friends of Simmons followed suit.
But while Simmons' family shed tears of sorrow, the families of Ann Olson and Keith O'Connell -- the two victims of Simmons' crime -- shed tears of relief.
The two James Madison University students were killed in Harrisonburg in 1996. This trial was to be in Harrisonburg, but defense attorneys successfully argued the trial should be moved because of pretrial publicity.
Outside the courtroom, U.S. District Attorney John Brownlee consoled members of both victims' families. Justice that had eluded them six years ago now was at hand.
The prosecution charged Simmons with interstate stalking and two counts of using a gun to commit murder. The charges were brought under the federal Violence Against Women Act, which allows jurors to call for the death penalty as the maximum sentence.
In 1998, a jury deadlocked and did not find Simmons guilty after a trial in Rockingham County Circuit Court. Simmons pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and received a 20-year sentence.
Loss Of Control
The jury's verdict isn't startling, considering Simmons' attorney Chris Kowalczuk admitted in his opening argument that Simmons killed Olson, 25, and O'Connell, 23.
Kowalczuk repeated the statement in his closing argument, but said the prosecution did not have enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Simmons intended to kill the young couple.
Olson and O'Connell were found dead, shot execution style.
Instead, Kowalczuk said that Simmons "flew into a rage" when he saw the two students early that October morning. He said that Simmons -- who had a long, but contentious relationship with Olson -- simply couldn't handle the fact that his girlfriend was moving on.
"I'm not telling you he didn't kill them," Kowalczuk told the jury. "But he saw them, and he realized that that was it. It was over. It doesn't make him an interstate stalker."
Throughout the trial, the prosecution displayed evidence that depicted Simmons as someone who was "losing control" of something. That something was Olson, said U.S. Attorney Tim Heaphy.
"No longer did he have what he tried to hold onto," Heaphy told the jury during the prosecution's closing argument.
Two Worlds
Friends of both Olson and Simmons testified that their relationship seemed exclusive. Some said that Olson, who was white, didn't think her family or friends would approve of her relationship with Simmons, who is black.
O'Connell didn't enter into the picture until the summer of 1996, when the relationship hit rock bottom. O'Connell was part of a group of friends Olson had made while working at Spanky's restaurant.
Kowalczuk hotly contested that Olson's "two worlds" -- the one with Simmons and the one with her friends from Spanky's -- presented a problem.
He argued that the apparent exclusiveness of the relationship only further isolated Simmons as the two grew apart from each other.
Later, Olson discovered that Simmons had fathered a child with another woman in Harrisonburg. This was said to be the "straw that broke the camel's back," and Olson decided to end the relationship. But contact between Olson and Simmons never ceased, even when Simmons moved to Florida for six weeks.
Heaphy argued that Simmons saw O'Connell as a threat, and that Simmons was trying to eliminate the "wedge" that was dividing him from Olson.
On at least two occasions, Simmons attempted to close the gap growing between him and Olson by confronting the new couple.
If Simmons is sentenced to death, he will join 34 other federal death row inmates.
Man awaits jury's decision on penalty for 2 murders
Reading Eagle (PA)
February 16, 2005
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ABINGDON, Va. - Jurors found a Pennsylvania man guilty of two capital counts in the 1996 slayings of two James Madison University students but adjourned Tuesday without deciding on his punishment.
Brent Simmons, 32, of Carlisle, Cumberland County, was found guilty by jurors late Monday after 3 1 /2 hours of deliberations of two counts of illegally using a firearm and one count of interstate stalking.
The charges were brought under the federal Violence Against Women Act, which allows jurors to call for the death penalty as the maximum sentence. He also could receive a term of life in prison.
Simmons was convicted of charges related to the slayings of Ann Olson, 25, and Keith O'Connell, 23, in Harrisonburg.
In 1998, a jury deadlocked and did not find Simmons guilty after a trial in Rockingham County Circuit Court.
At the time of Simmons' first trial, there was no physical evidence linking him to the killings. However, two years later a diver found a 9 mm handgun similar to the one used in the execution slayings in a lake near Simmons' hometown in Pennsylvania. Police said the serial number on the weapon matched one on a gun Simmons bought two months before the murders.
Simmons later pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and received a 20-year sentence.
Federal prosecutors successfully sought Simmons' indictment on the new charges and, with the blessing of then-U.S. Attorney John Ashcroft, said they would seek the death penalty.
In Simmons' U.S. District Court trial, defense attorney Chris Kowalczuk admitted that his client killed Olson, 25, and O'Connell, 23, after Simmons "flew into a rage" when he saw the couple together. Simmons had had a long relationship with Olson.
"I'm not telling you he didn't kill them," Kowalczuk told the jury. "But he saw them, and he realized that that was it. It was over. It doesn't make him an interstate stalker."
The prosecution, however, depicted Simmons as someone who was "losing control" of Olson.
"No longer did he have what he tried to hold on to," said U.S. Attorney Tim Heaphy.
Heaphy argued that Simmons saw O'Connell as a threat, and that Simmons was trying to eliminate the "wedge" that was dividing him from Olson.
The trial was moved from Harrisonburg to Abingdon because of pretrial news accounts.
STALKER GETS LIFE IN PRISON
FEDERAL JURY DECIDES AGAINST DEATH PENALTY IN TWO JMU SLAYINGS
Richmond Times-Dispatch (VA)
February 17, 2005
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A federal jury sentenced Brent Simmons to life in prison early today, rejecting the death penalty for the stalker who killed his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend, both students at James Madison University. A court clerk announced the jury's decision at 12:55 a.m., after more than seven hours of deliberations. Family members of the two slain students sat silently as the decision was read.
"He deserves the death penalty; give him what he deserves," Assistant U.S. Attorney Tim Heaphy had urged jurors before they left to begin deliberations in U.S. District Court.
In rejecting Heaphy's request, the jury sentenced Simmons, 32, to life in prison without possibility of parole for the killings of Ann M. Olson and Keith J. O'Connell.
Unlike in Virginia's circuit courts, a federal jury's decision is not a recommendation. U.S. District Judge Samuel Wilson did not have the option of altering it.
The jury convicted Simmons on Monday of interstate stalking and two counts of using a firearm in the commission of a murder. Testimony last week showed that when he learned that Olson and O'Connell had begun a serious relationship, Simmons drove 12 hours from Florida to Harrisonburg, where he shot the two in O'Connell's apartment. Simmons had moved to Florida several months after graduating from JMU in May 1996.
Because the charges were brought under the Violence Against Women Act, Simmons was eligible for the death penalty.
Yesterday, as Simmons sat passively beside defense attorney Jeffrey Dorsey of Salem, defense attorney Chris Kowalczuk of Roanoke urged jurors to spare Simmons' life, saying Simmons' exemplary life before the killings means he does not deserve the death penalty.
"He's going to die alone in prison, and I'm not going to tell you he doesn't deserve that," Kowalczuk said.
Deliberations began about 5:30 p.m. after a day of sentencing testimony that included Simmons' mother, "Pepsi" Simmons, who wept as she looked jurors in the eyes and beseeched them to show her son mercy.
"I ask you for my son's life," she said.
She said Simmons was a model son who played Little League baseball, loved fishing, captained the high school basketball team and was the quarterback of its football squad. She said she still does not know why he killed Olson and O'Connell.
"That was out of character," she said. "I don't know what happened."
Simmons has been in prison since 1998, when he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in a circuit court in Harrisonburg and was sentenced to 20 years. Federal prosecutors brought the stalking case against him in an effort to have him executed for the two murders.
Much of yesterday's testimony came from state prison guards and jailers who said Simmons has been a well-behaved prisoner who doesn't pose a threat to other inmates.
Simmons' high school principal and coach also testified, and Kowalczuk introduced Simmons' varsity letters in sports and several certificates of achievement that he had won in school in Carlisle, Pa.
The principal, Edward Plocki, said town residents cannot reconcile the murders with Simmons' polite demeanor and friendly disposition. "It doesn't fit, it doesn't fit for any of us back in Carlisle. This is what is so shocking. The Brent I know was an outstanding individual in school and outside school. He was a joy to talk to."
While Kowalczuk urged jurors to remember the testimony while deciding Simmons' fate, Heaphy, the prosecutor, told the panel that Simmons' life before the double homicide or since his incarceration does not outweigh the horrible nature of the crime.
"Mr. Simmons, in the ultimate act of selfishness, killed them for nothing," Heaphy said. "The remedy must be death."
When abuse breeds fear
Illegal immigrants extra vulnerable
Tucson Citizen (AZ)
February 21, 2005
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The women at the weekly cafecitos at Su Voz Vale - Your Voice Counts - on Tucson's South Side know they are in a safe place where they can talk in confidence about the abuse they've endured.
Some are illegal immigrants and live in fear of deportation.
They come to understand that this is group therapy for women with "issues of interpersonal violence," according to Su Voz Vale's bilingual pamphlet.
"It's not your fault," the pamphlet advises in Spanish.
While domestic violence affects all segments of society, experts say immigrant women, especially those who are here illegally, are among the most vulnerable because their immigration status often is tied to their abusers. The abusers are often U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents who keep the women isolated by refusing to apply for legal status for them.
In 1994, Congress recognized the problem when it approved the Violence Against Women Act. The law included provisions that granted battered illegal immigrants married to U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents the right to apply for legal residency on their own rather than depend on their husbands to petition for them.
In 2000, Congress extended access to special visas to battered illegal immigrant women, regardless of their relationship to their offender. And later this year, Congress is expected to vote whether to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act for five more years. The law has overwhelming bipartisan support.
But too many women are not aware of their rights under the law, said Rene Franco, an attorney for Catholic Social Services in Tucson who files petitions for illegal immigrants seeking legal status.
Many of the women who come to Su Voz Vale are living "in abject poverty," said director Montserrat Caballero. "It's a daily struggle for them just to live. Most are partners with legal residents, and one of the biggest things that is used against them is their legal status.
"'Go ahead. Call the police,' the spouse or boyfriend tells the woman. 'They're going to deport you.' "
Caballero said many of the women live in fear in "this very anti-immigrant state," wondering, "Can I go here? Can I go there?" without being deported.
Arizona voters last year approved Proposition 200, which requires state workers to report illegal immigrants to federal authorities if they apply for certain public benefits, but it does not affect domestic violence programs.
One in 4 women is a victim of domestic violence sometime during adulthood, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
But the incidence is even higher for immigrant women, especially those who are here illegally.
They often experience an increase in domestic violence after coming to this country. The abuse can be triggered or exacerbated by the pressures of living with instability in an unfamiliar country and working in low-wage jobs, said Leni Marin, managing director of the Family Violence Prevention Fund, a national organization based in San Francisco.
Immigrant women also tend to stay in abusive relationships longer than other abused women because they feel trapped in an unfamiliar country where they may not know the language or where to go for help.
And the longer they go without help, the more likely the abuse will get worse, she said.
"The violence may escalate to another level because they are not able to get help early," Marin said.
Crucita Nuanez-Ochoa, director of the De Colores domestic violence shelter in Phoenix, said Hispanic immigrants, who make up the vast majority of immigrants in the Southwest, often don't trust the legal system in the country they came from, so they are less likely to call police in the United States.
Raised in a macho culture, many Latinas also are taught to believe domestic violence is acceptable, Nuanez-Ochoa said.
Their parents may tell them, "He is your husband, the father of your children. He has a right to hit you," Nuanez-Ochoa said. Or Latina immigrants "have this really strong perception that marriage is forever, that they have to stay married."
In Tucson, there are two temporary shelters for battered women with 44 beds. One - Casa Amparo on the South Side - is a bilingual shelter.
Counseling is available at Su Voz Vale, a Southern Arizona Center Against Sexual Assault program on the campus of El Pueblo Neighborhood Center, a complex of satellite offices for state child support enforcement services, emergency rent assistance, food stamps and other government-funded programs. Counseling is also available at the Family Counseling Agency and the Tucson Centers for Women and Children.
The Southern Arizona Legal Aid Society files for legal status for most of the battered illegal immigrants who have sought help in the Tucson area.
"We do hundreds of these cases every year," said Valerie Hink, a staff attorney and supervisor of Legal Aid's immigration unit.
Hink said she has also trained 127 local attorneys and domestic violence shelter staff members about the legal options for battered immigrant women in the past year.
Franco at Catholic Social Services said some of "these women don't have anything" and that getting legal status so they can work legally and receive food stamps is important for their survival.
One client who was repeatedly raped by her husband when he got drunk has been staying at a shelter and is making tortillas and tamales and selling them to save money to get her own apartment, he said.
The cases "take a lot of patience," he said. "It can take several years to get a green card.
"These are women who have gone through so much trauma. The abuse, separation from their children, they are penniless. It's amazing the courage and the endurance they have."
Attorney Gloria Goldman has helped about 75 abused immigrant women obtain legal status since 1998. Most of the clients are Mexican, she said.
"Many of these cases don't involve physical violence," she said. "It's extreme emotional cruelty and control. These women were slaves to the abuser."
Often their children are U.S. citizens but the women are not, she said.
"They're so afraid to be sent to their home country," Goldman said. "The abuser will tell them, 'You're going home, and the children will stay here.' "
Last week, Goldman said she saw a Mexican woman and her children get their green cards "after years of abuse."
"She was crying. The son was so embarrassed, he hid his head inside his jacket. The abuser was a druggie who told the boy he'd never amount to anything. He (the boy) was a chess champion in elementary school."
Seeing them with their green cards, Goldman said, "It was a beautiful thing."
Advocates want quicker work permits for battered migrants
Tucson Citizen (AZ)
February 21, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
Advocates for battered women are pushing Congress to expand the Violence Against Women Act, including allowing battered immigrants who petition for legal residency to receive work permits right away.
Granting immigrant women immediate work permits would make it easier for them to leave abusers, advocates said.
Now, they cannot work while petitions are pending and the process can take a year or longer.
Advocates want Congress to add a provision that would give immigrant parents who are victims of abuse the right to apply for legal residency.
"Immigrant parents who come to the United States are often elderly people who don't speak English and can't work," said Joanne Lin, a senior staff attorney at Legal Momentum. "Their only connection to the outside world is through their son or daughter, and many times they are literally locked up in their houses."
Advocates are pushing Congress to include provisions that would stop the detention or deportation of immigrant women who have suffered domestic violence.
Also this year, advocates hope to reintroduce the Women Immigrants Safe Harbor Act. Originally introduced in Congress in 2001, the bill would allow legal immigrant women who have suffered domestic abuse, including those who have petitioned for legal status under the Violence Against Women Act, to qualify for welfare benefits, including food stamps and Medicaid.
Backers have said the bill is intended to provide a safety net to help immigrant women leave an abusive environment and get back on their feet.
Scalia, an activist judge
Rutland Herald (VT)
April 20, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
Not since the 1960s, when federal judges in the South were threatened by cross burnings and firebombs, have judges been so besieged. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, set off a furor when he said judges could be inviting physical attacks with controversial decisions. And last week the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, called for an investigation of the federal judges in the Terri Schiavo case, saying ominously: "We set up the courts. We can unset the courts."
Conservatives claim that they are rising up against "activist judges," who decide cases based on their personal beliefs rather than the law. They frequently point to Justice Antonin Scalia as a model of honest, "strict constructionist" judging. And Scalia has eagerly embraced the hero's role. Last month, after the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty for those under 18, he lashed out at his colleagues for using the idea of a "living Constitution" that evolves over time to hand down political decisions - something he says he would never do.
The idea that liberal judges are advocates and partisans while judges like Scalia are not is being touted everywhere these days, and it is pure myth. Scalia has been more than willing to ignore the Constitution's plain language, and he has a knack for coming out on the conservative side in cases with an ideological bent. The conservative partisans leading the war on activist judges are just as inconsistent: They like judicial activism just fine when it advances their own agendas.
Scalia's views on federalism - which now generally command a majority on the Supreme Court - are perhaps the clearest example of the problem with the conservative attack on judicial activism. When conservatives complain about activist judges, they talk about gay marriage and defendants' rights. But they do not mention the 11th Amendment, which has been twisted beyond its own plain words into a states' rights weapon to throw minorities, women and the disabled out of federal court.
The 11th Amendment says federal courts cannot hear lawsuits against a state brought by "Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State." But it's been interpreted to block suits by a state's own citizens - something it clearly does not say. How to get around the Constitution's express words? In a 1991 decision, Scalia wrote that "despite the narrowness of its terms," the 11th Amendment has been understood by the court "to stand not so much for what it says, but for the presupposition of our constitutional structure which it confirms."
If another judge used that rationale to find rights in the Constitution - in this case, rights for states - Scalia's reaction would be withering. He went on, in that 1991 decision, to throw out a suit by Indian tribes who said they had been cheated by the state of Alaska.
Conservative politicians insist that courts should defer to the democratically elected branches, but conservative judges do not seem to be listening. The Supreme Court's conservative majority regularly overturns laws passed by Congress, like the Violence Against Women Act and the Gun-Free School Zones Act. The court has even established a bizarre series of hoops Congress must jump through to pass a law protecting Americans' 14th Amendment equal-protection rights. Congress must prove in many cases that the law it passed is "congruent" and "proportional" to the harm being addressed. Even John Noonan Jr., an appeals court judge appointed by President Ronald Reagan, has said these new rules - which Scalia eagerly embraces - reduce Congress to the level of an "administrative agency."
Scalia likes to boast that he follows his strict-constructionist philosophy wherever it leads, even if it leads to results he disagrees with. But it is uncanny how often it leads him just where he already wanted to go. In his view, the 14th Amendment prohibits Michigan from using affirmative action in college admissions, but lets Texas make gay sex a crime. (The Supreme Court has held just the opposite.) He is dismissive when inmates invoke the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment to challenge prison conditions. But he is supportive when wealthy people try to expand the "takings clause" to block the government from regulating their property.
The inconsistency of the conservative war on judges was apparent in the Terri Schiavo ordeal. DeLay, an outspoken critic of activist courts, does not want to investigate the federal trial judge and the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for judicial activism, but for the opposite: for refusing to overturn the Florida state courts' legal decisions, and Michael Schiavo's decisions about his wife's medical care.
The classic example of conservative inconsistency remains Bush v. Gore. Not only did the court's conservative bloc trample on the Florida state courts and stop the vote counting - it declared its ruling would not be a precedent for future cases. How does Scalia explain that decision? In a recent New Yorker profile, he is quoted as saying, with startling candor, that "the only issue was whether we should put an end to it, after three weeks of looking like a fool in the eyes of the world." That, of course, isn't a constitutional argument - it is an unapologetic defense of judicial activism.
When it comes to judicial activism, conservative judges are no better than liberal ones - and, it must be said, no worse. If conservatives are going to continue their war on the judiciary, though, they should be honest. They do not want to get rid of judicial activists, a standard that would bring down even Scalia. They want to rid the courts of judges who disagree with them.
Rule of law being challenged
Journal Gazette, The (Fort Wayne, IN)
April 22, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
In the last half-century, conservative politicians have mounted three dramatically different attacks on the federal judiciary. The first attack, in which they emphasized the need for judicial restraint, was principled and coherent. The second, which called on judges to consider the original meaning of the Constitution, was more radical but still had honorable goals: to promote stability, neutrality and the rule of law.
The third attack, however, is the most worrisome: a large-scale challenge to judicial independence, and we are in the midst of it.
During the first of the three waves, beginning around 1955, conservatives attacked liberal activist judges for seizing on ambiguous constitutional provisions to strike down decisions of elected officials. The conservatives were concerned about Supreme Court rulings protecting accused criminals, above all Miranda v. Arizona, which required police to inform suspects of their rights. The principals were Justices William O. Douglas, William J. Brennan Jr. and Earl Warren - the liberal leaders of the Warren court. The attack on the Warren court helped fuel Gerald Ford's failed effort to impeach Douglas in 1970.
In this period, conservatives promoted judicial "restraint," calling on judges to hesitate before interpreting the Constitution to strike down reasonable judgments of the people's representatives. President Nixon, for instance, sought to end the era of judicial "activism" by appointing judges who scaled back protection of criminal defendants and who rejected efforts to use the Constitution to protect the poor.
The second attack on the judiciary, which began in the early 1980s, no longer emphasized restraint. Instead it built on the approach to constitutional interpretation known as "originalism" - the view that the Constitution means exactly what it meant when it was ratified. Some of these conservatives called for restoration of what they called "the lost Constitution."
Of course, defenders of the lost Constitution oppose new protections of criminal defendants. They have no sympathy for the right of privacy enunciated in Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade. But many originalists are far more ambitious; they also believe, for instance, that Congress should not have more power over interstate commerce than it had in 1787. Unlike those who called for judicial restraint in the 1970s, these originalists are perfectly willing to use the Constitution to strike down decisions of elected officials - if those decisions are inconsistent with the original meaning of the ratifiers.
On important occasions, this argument has found a receptive audience within the Rehnquist court, whose members have referred to the original understanding of the ratifiers in striking down the Violence Against Women Act and a key provision of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, among many other laws.
Originalism is a radical program, but it has one admirable feature: It is designed to promote judicial independence from the political process and the rule of law, by ensuring what Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the most prominent originalist, calls a "rock-solid, unchanging Constitution." Scalia has deplored the fact that the "American people have been converted to belief in The Living Constitution, a `morphing' document that means, from age to age, what it ought to mean."
But now we are witnessing a third wave of attack, in which originalism is receding and in which many conservative politicians want judges to read the Constitution, and the law in general, as if it fits with the Republican Party platform. After all, Republican presidents have succeeded in reconstructing the federal judiciary so that it is dominated by handpicked GOP appointees. Liberal activism is dying if not dead. Why shouldn't Republicans take advantage of their dominance of the judiciary to ensure that their preferred policies are implemented by courts?
The problem, as the legal battle over Terri Schiavo demonstrated, is that whatever their politics, judges are unlikely to ignore the law. In that case, the law clearly did not authorize federal judges to order Schiavo's feeding tube reinserted - but some Republicans are outraged that the judges did not have it reinserted anyway. Now, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay instructed the Judiciary Committee to investigate federal court decisions in the Schiavo case.
The attack on the judges who refused to order the feeding tube reinserted might be trivial by itself. But it is of a piece with something much more important.
In recent years, some conservative politicians have been insisting that federal judges should strike down affirmative action programs, protect commercial advertising, invalidate environmental regulations, allow the president to do whatever he likes in the war on terrorism, use the Constitution to produce tort reform, invalidate gun control regulation, invalidate campaign finance laws and much more - regardless of whether they can find solid justification for these steps in our founding document.
Now, the battle over the confirmation process has become enmeshed with this third and most extreme stage of conservative thinking. What we are seeing, for the first time, is a fundamental challenge to the rule of law itself.
Memo: Cass R. Sunstein teaches law at the University of Chicago. He wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.
What's federalism among friends?
Washington Times, The (DC)
May 10, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
"The more things change, the more they remain the same," according to the long forgotten Frenchman Alphonse Karr. Take the bipartisan mauling of federalism.
The Democrat Party earned harsh criticism from Republicans and scorching rebukes from the U.S. Supreme Court for chronic invasions of states' rights during the early years of the 1990s.
Since the Great Society delusions of President Lyndon B. Johnson, Democrats have assumed the powers of Congress are unlimited absent an express constitutional prohibition. The assumption turned the Constitution on its head. It evoked stentorian pledges from Republicans to honor traditional state prerogatives and to restore the Founding Fathers' design of a limited federal government, not a Leviathan. But after capturing control of Congress and the White House, Republicans are bettering the instruction of Democrats in pulverizing federalism. The pledges of change proved hollow, like a munificent bequest in a pauper's will, to borrow from Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson.
In 1990, Democrats twisted congressional authority to regulate interstate commerce to enact the Gun-Free School Zones Act. The law made it a federal criminal offense to possess a firearm within 1,000 feet of school grounds. The objective was the punishment of gun violence or its threat, conduct already criminal under state prohibitions. The Act neither regulated commercial activity nor contained any requirement the possession be aided by interstate commerce.
In United States v. Lopez (1995), the Supreme Court voided the Act as beyond the Commerce Clause power. Writing for the 5-4 majority that included Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist scolded Congress for ignoring the instruction of James Madison in Federalist 45: "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the state governments are numerous and indefinite."
A Democrat Congress again galloped off its constitutional reservation in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA). The law responded to an opinion by Justice Scalia in Employment Division v. Smith (1990) confining the First Amendment's protection of religious freedom short of theocracy. RFRA compelled states to confer greater religious freedom than required by the Constitution under the false banner of enforcing the Fourteenth Amendment. Accordingly, the Supreme Court voided the law in City of Boerne v. Flores (1997), and explained that "enforcement" is no synonym for "enlargement."
In 1993, Democrats enacted the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. It conscripted state and local law enforcement officers to conduct background checks on would-be purchasers of handguns. Speaking through Justice Scalia in Printz v. United States (1997), the Supreme Court held that the conscription violated the sovereignty of states celebrated by federalism.
In 1994, Democrats stretched the Commerce Clause to enact the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). It fashioned a federal civil damages remedy for the victims of gender-motivated violence. But VAWA neither regulated commercial transactions nor was tied to a crime with a nexus to interstate commerce. Accordingly, the Supreme Court condemned the statute as beyond the powers of Congress in United States v. Morrison (2000). Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Rehnquist ridiculed the idea that gender-motivated crimes implicated the Commerce Clause because of their hyper-attenuated connection with employee productivity, medical costs, and supply and demand curves for products sold in interstate commerce.
President Bush and a Republican Congress have continued lacerating states' rights without breaking stride from their Democrat predecessors. Reminiscent of Patrick Henry toward King George III, the Republican Party sound track whispers, "If this be treason to federalism, let's make the most of it."
In 2000, Congress passed the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), a mirror image of RFRA that the Supreme Court had invalidated in City of Boerne. Tied to the federal spending power, the law repeats RFRA's unconstitutional demand that states offer greater religious freedom in land use and prison settings than the Constitution requires. A constitutional attack on RLUIPA is pending in the high court.
Without a crumb of authority, Republicans enacted the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, a flagrant invasion of state jurisdiction over abortions. In 2005, a Republican Congress reinforced by President Bush passed the notorious Terri Schiavo legislation in disregard of a final state court ruling interpreting state law issued in scrupulous compliance with due process. Championed by Mr. Bush and congressional Republicans, the Federal Marriage Amendment and the Victims' Rights Amendment equally slight federalism. Ditto for the proposed Common Sense Medical Malpractice Reform Act; proposed legislation (S.397) to shield gun manufacturers or distributors from civil liability based on gun misuse by others; and, a provision in the pending Energy Policy Act shielding MTBE manufacturers from state tort liability for distributing an allegedly defective product.
The House of Representatives recently passed the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act (CIAN), another slap at state sovereignty. The power of a state generally is confined to conduct within its territorial boundaries. Further, the Privileges and Immunities Clause of Article IV of the Constitution generally requires states to treat residents and nonresidents equally. Citizens enjoy a constitutional right to travel to sister States and to receive the benefits of their laws. Yet the CIAN would expose to federal criminal prosecution interstate travel to obtain a legal abortion for a minor if the operation would have been illegal in the patient's home state. In other words, states would be compelled to enforce the abortion laws of sister jurisdictions in violation of their own public policy and the Privileges and Immunities Clause.
The Republican Party should return to the political enlightenment of Justice Louis D. Brandeis in New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann (1932): "It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country."
Bruce Fein is a constitutional lawyer and international consultant with Bruce Fein & Associates and the Lichfield Group.
Men also are victims of domestic violence
Delaware State News (Dover, DE)
May 21, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
As members of the Safe Homes for Children & Families Coalition (SHCFC), we must respond to Sen. Joseph Biden's recent claims in a news story about the billboards SHCFC placed around Delaware calling on him to make the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) gender neutral. We invite readers to view the documents referenced herein on the SHCFC website, vawa4all.org.
Apparently Sen. Biden now accepts the fact that male victims represent a significant portion of those who experience the terrible scourge of domestic violence. But for the record, while different studies show the number of male victims to range from 15 percent to 50 percent of the total, the U.S. Department of Justice reports the number to be 836,000, or 36 percent of the total. This is confirmed by state police department statistics across the country including Delaware, which has reported the number to be 32 percent.
Finally recognizing that men are victims of domestic violence to a significant degree, Sen. Biden now claims that his legislative legacy, the VAWA, ensures equal services for these male victims.
In the recent news article regarding our plea for him to make the VAWA gender neutral, the senator claimed that VAWA does not leave out men. He stated, "Nothing in the act denies services, programs, funding or assistance to male victims."
The "act" on paper may indeed appear gender neutral. However, a great deal of misinformation promulgated by those who legislate on behalf of and serve domestic violence victims is not, nor are many of the shelter programs that are funded by said "act." As persons who have been on the frontlines providing services and assistance to victims of violence, we know from what we speak.
The Domestic Abuse Helpline for Men (DAHM) struggles everyday with the dilemma of receiving phone calls from those concerned about male victims and male victims themselves across the country, over 5,000 last year alone, who were desperate to protect themselves and their children from violent female partners. Callers to the help-line report that they sought out services from their local domestic violence program, only to be turned away.
Confronted with this problem, DAHM conducted an e-mail survey of over 1,000 shelters around the country (this number is just over half of all the domestic violence victims programs nationally) to identify those to which it could refer male victim callers in need of shelter, support and/or legal advocacy. Of the 300 that responded, a miniscule 6.5 percent, or 65 of the 1,000 shelters surveyed, indicated they provided equal sheltering services to both women and men.
However, even of the 65 that responded that they offered equal services, only a fraction actually sheltered both men and women in safe housing. The rest offered very short-term hotel vouchers and homeless shelters to men. Only a handful indicated they provide counseling/support groups for male victims. This neglect of male victims is not by oversight. Many responding shelters were very explicit in stating that they "only serve women and children."
Moreover, there has been a deliberate effort on the part of these VAWA-funded programs to deny male victims. DAHM has twice applied to the VAWA-funded National Domestic Violence Hotline (NDVH) to have DAHM's toll-free 24/7 helpline number placed in the NDVH's database.
This would allow the thousands of men who call there can be referred to DAHM rather than - as now happens - to be referred by the NDVH to the local women's shelter. As it stands now, the response from the shelter may very well be, "We don't serve men, goodbye...click."
Further, after requesting and being denied membership in the home state coalition where DAHM resides (Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence), DAHM was forced to expend valuable resources filing a lawsuit in order to seek declaratory judgment and hopefully membership in this publicly funded umbrella organization.
In the case of domestic violence homicide, the needs of families impacted by family violence do not end with the murder of a loved one. In addition to supporting programs that offer shelter, counseling and other services, VAWA funds should at the very least provide counseling and support groups for the parents, children and other loved ones left traumatized by domestic violence homicide - regardless of the victim's gender.
We feel that if VAWA funding is available to be used for all victims of domestic violence, then there should be no problem with adding a simple statement into the legislation when it is re-authorized this year.
That statement would say, "Nothing in this legislation shall be construed to prohibit any funding for programs serving male victims."
EDITOR'S NOTE: Jan Brown is a founder and co-director of the Domestic Abuse Helpline for Men Stop the Violence, Inc. based in Harmony, Maine, and Albany, N.Y.
Kathy Garcia is past president of the New Jersey Crime Victims' Coalition and served on the committee that successfully pushed for passage of the Crime Victims' Rights Amendment to the New Jersey. State Constitution in 1991. Her 21-year-old nephew was a victim of domestic violence homicide.
FILIBUSTER ISSUE CENTERS AROUND CORPORATE DOLLARS
Buffalo News, The (NY)
May 23, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
Mark it in your family Bible, or scrapbook. This is the year that the Republican ultra-right dropped all pretext of being a "uniter and not a divider."
With growing regularity, someone from that camp descends into careless talk or behavior. Last week, it was Republican Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania accusing Democrats of behaving like "Hitler" in their quest to save the tradition of the filibuster.
Santorum, one of the Capitol's leading lightweights, was trying to top an outrage committed by his Texas colleague, John Cronyn. On April 4, Cronyn issued a license for terrorism in the courthouse in a Senate floor speech.
"We seem to have run through a spate of courthouse violence recently that's been on the news and I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public," said Cronyn, a former judge and state attorney general, working carefully from a sheet of talking points.
Cronyn's was a more artful threat to the soul and safety of the judiciary than uttered days before by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas.
Cronyn and Santorum don't wear black leather and chains in public. But they are motorcycle gang leaders in the GOP's campaign, driven by President Bush himself, to get a majority vote on a brace of conservative judges.
Conservatives' core complaint about the judiciary, which is not entirely without merit, is that courts are unduly expanding concepts of privacy implicit in the Bill of Rights into ever-widening latitude on sex issues. Republicans claim these progressive judges are usurping the role of legislatures throughout the land.
The new flash-points, of course, are court rulings creating a right of homosexuals to marry, which makes many people think that the family is under judicial attack. Using its Rolodex of conservative organizations, the White House is fanning the flames among the Wahoos.
But the faithful are being duped. This filibuster fight is not about abortion or homosexuality or cloning. It is about money.
The new corporate model, the global one that finances the ultra-right in the Senate and the House, wants to dismantle a century-old social contract that created the American middle class that pays the country's bills and still fights its wars.
Multinational corporations own the White House and the Republican Congress, and many Democrats. Big business no longer wants to pay for pensions, Social Security and anti-trust and consumer protection.
It is no coincidence the first trio of Bush nominees to be reconsidered by the Senate happen to adhere to the corporate line, judging by their prior rulings or pleadings. Taken together, nominees Priscilla Owen, Janice Rogers Brown and Bill Pryor oppose consumer and anti-trust protections accepted by a different kind of Republican in office in the 1890s and the early 20th century, Republicans like William McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.
Collectively, Owen, Brown and Pryor frown on the constitutionality of Social Security, federal laws against discrimination, the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Securities & Exchange Act, the Violence Against Women Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act and defendants' right to counsel.
Their seeming willingness to rewrite laws that have cost businesses a lot of money is what excites the ultra-right, not gay rights or reproductive issues. They're just smoke screens set up for angry suckers.
With rightists calling the tune in two branches of government, corporate America now sees its chance to unravel the most beneficial social contract in the history of the world by controlling the judiciary.
Act shields women from violence
Delaware State News (Dover, DE)
June 9, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
I am pleased to announce the introduction of the Biden/Specter/Hatch Violence Against Women Act of 2005. I consider the Violence Against Women Act the single most significant legislation that I've crafted during my 32-year tenure in the Senate.
This law is my baby, so to speak, and I take very seriously my responsibilities to ensure that it is adequately funded and renewed. What was once an infant statute seeking legitimacy in the public eye and in the halls of government is now a feisty 10-year-old law that has made its presence known from Long Beach, Calif., to Dover.
But in September 2005, the act will expire. Congress and the president must act quickly in the next three months to renew the backbone of our country's fight to end domestic violence and sexual assault - the Violence Against Women Act. We simply cannot let the act lapse or become buried in partisan bickering.
The enactment of the Violence Against Women Act in 1994 was the beginning of a national and historic commitment to women and children victimized by domestic violence and sexual assault. Thus far, our commitment has yielded extraordinary progress. Since the act's passage, domestic violence has dropped by almost 50 percent. Incidents of rape are down by 60 percent. The number of women killed by an abusive husband or boyfriend is down by 22 percent. More than half of all rape victims are stepping forward to report the crime. More than a million women have found justice in our courtrooms and obtained domestic violence protective orders.
The Violence Against Women Act provides critical resources so that our communities may implement big and small improvements that can have a profound impact. For instance, right here in Delaware, the act's rural grant program helped the Delaware State Police establish fully equipped, dedicated domestic violence units in two counties.
The STOP program provided a shelter with funding to purchase a van to pick up battered women and their children who have nowhere else to turn.
Today, we uphold our commitment to America's families. Despite the incredible strides made, far too many women remain afraid to go home or to tell anyone about the rape that happened at last night's party. We cannot let the Violence Against Women Act become a victim of its own success. Instead, we need to usher the act into the 21st century and implement it with the next generation - recent police academy graduates who want to be trained on handling family violence, newly elected state legislators who want to update state laws on sexual assault, and the next generation of children who must be taught that abuse will not be tolerated.
This achievement - the introduction of a bipartisan, compromise bill that both reinvigorates existing programs and creates bold initiatives to tackle new issues - has been a year in the making. As I drafted the new version of the Violence Against Women Act, I listened closely to the recommendations of those on the front lines to end the violence - police, emergency room nurses, victim advocates, shelter directors, and prosecutors - and made targeted improvements to existing grant programs, and tightened-up criminal laws.
A wide variety of groups worked hard with Sen. Specter, Sen. Hatch and me to create this bill, including the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the National Network to End Domestic Violence, the Family Violence Prevention Fund, and Legal Momentum. Also, the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence, the National Center for Victims for Crime, the American Bar Association, the National District Attorneys Association, the National Council on Family and Juvenile Court Judges, the National Association of Chiefs of Police, the National Sheriffs' Association and many others.
I want to explain a few of my principles guiding the drafting of the Violence Against Women Act of 2005.
First, I remain dedicated to the cornerstone programs in the act such as the STOP grant program, the Rural Grant program and the National Domestic Violence Hotline. These are enormously successful initiatives that are the scaffolding of the act. These foundations must be strengthened, not neglected.
Second, ending domestic violence and sexual assault has, and will continue to cost money. This is simply not a goal that can be accomplished on the cheap. Our success in ending family violence is not a signal to reduce funding; rather it is a clear message that we must continue what we've started. We can't afford to lose the gains that we have made. We've found a winning combination, and Congress should continue to spend its money so effectively.
Third, the 2005 bill is an ambitious, but reasoned, effort to solve the next level of challenges for battered women and their children. We've made tremendous strides in treating domestic violence and sexual assaults as public crimes with accountable offenders and creating coordinated community responses to help victims. Our next task is to look beyond the immediate crisis and provide long-term solutions for victims, as well as redouble our prevention efforts. Therefore, this bill includes important efforts to ease the housing crisis for victims fleeing their homes, provide more economic security for victims by preserving their employment stability. It engages boys and men in initiatives to prevent domestic violence from occurring in the first place, and enlists the health care community in identifying and treating victims.
My final principle is that ending violence against women is truly a shared goal - one that is held by Democrats and Republicans, one that is supported by men and women, and one that is desired by both government and by the private sector. The continued success of the Violence Against Women Act depends upon bipartisan commitment.
I am both proud of and inspired by the success of the Violence Against Women Act, but as we have learned, domestic violence is a complicated problem with complicated solutions. True success will only come with a sustained commitment and renewed vigilance. For every person whose life has been turned around as a result of these measures, there remain countless more in need of help. We must continue to show them that we will never forget.
EDITOR'S NOTE: U.S. Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., D-Del, is a member of the Judiciary and Foreign Relations committees. He resides in Wilmington.
Biden introduces renewed bill
Legislation extend protections for women, children
Delaware State News (Dover, DE)
June 9, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
WASHINGTON - Sen. Joseph R. Biden, D-Del., and Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., on Wednesday introduced the Violence Against Women Act of 2005 Wednesday.
The legislation renews several successful programs and provides funding for training, education and outreach so that state and federal agencies can do a better job of preventing violence against women and assisting victims of domestic violence.
Sen. Biden, author of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 and VAWA 2000, called the legislation "critical to ensuring the safety and well being of our nation's women and children."
"We broke tremendous ground in 1994 and 2000. We wrote new domestic violence laws," Sen. Biden said.
"We outlawed marital rape. We distributed over $3.8 billion to states and towns to train and support police, lawyers, judges, nurses, shelter directors and advocates to end domestic violence and sexual assault. And as a result, we've seen an almost 50 percent drop in domestic violence. But we must do more.
"The bill we are introducing provides a comprehensive approach to combating domestic violence. It stiffens penalties for repeat offenders, provides more money for vital services and will help battered women get the assistance and support they need. It also focuses on breaking the cycle of violence through education and helping rural victims in under-served areas."
According to the Department of Justice, on average, more than three women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends in this country every day. More than 2.5 million women are victims of violence each year and nearly one in every three women experiences at least one physical assault by a partner during adulthood. Reports also indicate that up to 10 million children experience domestic violence in their homes each year.
"The Violence Against Women Act helped Americans recognize battered women are survivors worthy of our support, not women who should wear long sleeves and sunglasses to work to hide their bruises," Sen. Biden said. "Now we need to go to the next level. This bill helps take us there.
"We need to address battered women's dire housing needs. It should never be a choice between getting beat up by your partner at home or becoming homeless. We need to enlist the help of employers so that a battered woman or rape victim can attend a trial or seek medical treatment without losing her job. We need to ease the immigration ties that bind battered immigrant women to their abuser.
"We need to devote more attention to the millions of children who silently witness domestic violence and teenagers caught in violent dating relationships because preventing the violence means reaching our kids."
Sen. Biden also noted that VAWA 2005 will not only save lives, but also save money. A 2002 university study found that money spent to reduce domestic violence saved nearly 10 times the potential costs incurred between 1995 and 2000. During that time, the federal government spent $1.6 billion for the act's programs and avoided spending an estimated $14.8 billion on medical, legal and other victimization costs. On an individual level, the bill costs about $15.50 per woman in the United States and saves an estimated $159 per woman.
The bill now goes to the Judiciary Committee, where it must be approved before being voted on by the full Senate.
Senate confirms 3 more appeals-court judges
Seattle Times, The (WA)
June 10, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
WASHINGTON — The Senate yesterday confirmed three appellate-court judges, ending years of Democratic maneuvers against some of President Bush's judicial nominees that had threatened the Senate with institutional breakdown.
Two of the nominees were approved unanimously, but Democrats fiercely contested the third, former Alabama Attorney General William Pryor. Three Republicans voted against him in a rare break with their president.
The Senate voted 53 to 45 to confirm Pryor for a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta. Pryor, 43, has served on the court since early last year because Bush made him a recess appointment, but he would have been forced off the bench this year had the Senate not acted.
Republicans Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Susan Collins of Maine and Olympia Snowe of Maine voted against Pryor. Two Democrats, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Ken Salazar of Colorado, voted for him. Sens. James Jeffords, I-Vt., and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, did not vote. Washington Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell voted against Pryor.
Liberals have denounced Pryor's opposition to abortion and his criticisms of the Voting Rights Act and the Supreme Court's death-penalty rulings. But Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said Pryor "has an outstanding record on civil rights ... Those who criticize Judge Pryor's record have not examined it with the care and respect" it deserved.
Pryor joins Priscilla Owen of Texas and Janice Rogers Brown of California as newly confirmed appellate-court nominees who were championed by conservatives but strenuously opposed by liberals. They were among 10 nominees filibustered in Bush's first term in a battle over the federal judiciary that grew increasingly bitter after Bush's re-election.
Last month, seven Democratic senators and seven Republicans agreed to clear the path for Pryor, Owen and Brown in return for scuttling Frist's threat to change Senate rules to ban judicial filibusters. Two other contested appellate-court nominees — William Myers of Idaho and Henry Saad of Michigan — will remain blocked. Many senators said the accord's toughest test will come when the Supreme Court has its first vacancy in more than a decade.
The Senate yesterday unanimously confirmed Richard Griffin and David McKeague, both of Michigan, to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. They were among the 10 filibustered nominees from Bush's first term, partly because of GOP stalling on confirmation votes for several of President Clinton's nominees from Michigan.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said Pryor "has argued that the federal courts should cut back on the protections of important and well-supported federal laws, including the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Clean Water Act, the Violence Against Women Act, and the Family and Medical Leave Act. He has repudiated decades of legal precedents that permitted individuals to sue states to prevent violations of federal civil-rights regulations."
Domestic violence cut by half
Advocates fear funding loss, say problem is far from solved; Domestic violence drops sharply
Salt Lake Tribune, The (UT)
June 13, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
The rate of family violence fell by more than half between 1993 and 2002, mirroring an overall downward trend of violent crime during the same period, the Bureau of Justice Statistics announced today.
In 1993, an estimated 5.4 victims per 1,000 people age 12 or older were victimized by a family member, such as a spouse or parent. In 2002, however, that had fallen to 2.1 family violence victims per 1,000 people 12 or older.
Family violence as a proportion of all violent crimes remained about the same. Between 1993 and 2002, the most recent year for which data were available, about one in 10 violent crimes were committed by the victims' family members.
Although at first glance the report seems to be good news, Brandy Farmer, chairwoman of the Utah Domestic Violence Council, said it could simply mean that fewer victims made reports to police -- a step backward in the fight against domestic violence.
In Utah, she said, "one of the reasons victims won't report domestic violence is they fear their children are going to be taken away."
Family violence was measured two different ways by the bureau: through survey interviews with samples of the population and through statistics compiled by police.
The report shows that some family violence incidents do go unreported -- about 40 percent because "it was a private or personal matter," and 12 percent in order to protect the offender.
Farmer points out that the bureau compiled police data from only 18 states and the District of Columbia, from jurisdictions that do not include areas with a population of 1 million or more.
Still, Esta Soler, president of the Family Violence Prevention Fund, said the report "offers a ray of hope that our nation is finally on the right track in addressing the violence that devastates so many families in this country."
"But our work is not nearly done. Domestic, dating and family violence are still taking a terrible toil," she said.
Beverly Balos, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and an expert in domestic violence issues, said, "We should be celebrating the overall decline in domestic violence in terms of thinking about services that have been possible over the last 10 years in individual states. It's made a difference in keeping women and children safe."
But it is those services that could be hurt by the report, Farmer said.
"Especially when Senator Orrin Hatch and Senator Joseph Biden's new 2005 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act is about to be introduced into Congress within the month of June," she said. "We desperately need the funding for domestic violence services and programs."
In October -- domestic violence awareness month -- the Utah Domestic Violence Council hopes to release its own report on family violence crimes in the state, Farmer said. Past reports show Utah exceeds the national average for the most violent family crime -- homicide. In 2001, the state ranked 16th for number of domestic violence murders.
The report also showed:
* About one in five people murdered in 2002 were killed by a family member. Of all homicide cases that year, spouses were killed in about 9 percent of the cases. In about 6 percent of the cases, a son or daughter was killed, and in 7 percent, another family member.
* Men are typically the offenders, and women the victims. In about 73 percent of the cases reported, a woman was the victim, and in 76 percent of the cases, the offender was a man.
* Half of convicted family violence offenders in prison in 1997 were serving a sentence for committing a sex crime against a family member.
* About 45 percent of convicted family violence offenders in local jails in 2002 had been subject to a restraining order at some point.
LAW EXPIRING
June 13, 2005
Seattle Post-Intelligencer (WA)
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell yesterday called for Congress to renew the Violence Against Women Act, which is set to expire at the end of this year. The landmark act, first passed in 1994, toughened federal laws on violent crimes committed against women and funded programs to protect women from domestic violence. Cantwell is co-sponsoring the Violence Against Women Act of 2005, which would stiffen penalties for repeat domestic violence offenders, provide more resources for battered women and help pay for local law enforcement training programs, she said during an appearance in Seattle with advocates of domestic violence programs.
Pulling Up Lame
Loser versus loser: Handicapping the coming Supreme Court vacancies
Village Voice, The (New York, NY)
June 14, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
WASHINGTON, D.C.—The muggy summer has settled over the capital, and the political junkies have turned to handicapping the Supreme Court nominees—that is, the people who are thought to be possible candidates for the expected three openings.
This list of second- and third-rate jurists is unimpressive.
No wonder polls show that the public is tiring of the court. There are a couple of strong right-wingers in the group, but for the most part it's a bedraggled lot. Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia look like veritable giants in comparison. Following is a tip sheet on the grim prospects.
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Relatively serious contenders
JAMES HARVIE WILKINSON III: By all odds the most prominent, the 60-year-old Wilkinson was appointed to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, by President Reagan in 1984 and served as chief judge from 1996 to 2003. Born in New York, he clerked for Justice Lewis Powell and worked in the Reagan administration as deputy assistant attorney general in the civil rights division. Wilkinson ran for Congress from Virginia in the early '70s and lost. Then he became editorial-page editor at the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. He has been a professor at the University of Virginia, his alma mater. The Fourth Circuit is not only conservative but the home base for the military. And Wilkinson can be counted on to defer to the Pentagon, especially when it comes to the war on terror. It was no surprise that this judge led the Court of Appeals in ruling that Yaser Hamdi, an American citizen captured in battle in Afghanistan, could be held indefinitely without access to a lawyer. The Supreme Court had to restrain Wilkinson and overturned that decision. Wilkinson has opposed affirmative action and the Violence Against Women Act. Wilkinson's supporters argue that he is no rubber-stamp ideologue but rather a pragmatic conservative who might end up following in the steps of Sandra O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy, as opposed to Thomas and Scalia. That may be, but Wilkinson looks more like a lickspittle for the Pentagon.
MICHAEL MCCONNELL: A Denver 10th Circuit judge, McConnell is known as a conservative legal scholar. He clerked under famed liberal D.C. Appeals Court judge J. Skelly Wright and then for William Brennan. Under Reagan, McConnell served in the Office of the Solicitor General and has taught at, among other places, the University of Chicago. He is vehemently against the Roe v. Wade decision, claiming that it confers a 'private right' to use lethal violence to ' 'solve' personal problems.' Roe is 'a gross misinterpretation of the Constitution,' according to McConnell, and 'an embarrassment to those who take constitutional law seriously.' He supports an amendment to undo it and, additionally, wants to ensure that unborn children are protected under the Constitution. Federal and state legislatures should ban abortion, he thinks, and impose criminal sanctions on women who have them and on doctors who perform them.
McConnell does not appear to believe in any separation of church and state, having accused those who do—including John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer—of engaging in 'extremist rhetoric.' He says those who are hostile to such a separation, Scalia and Thomas, are 'gutsy.' He has testified before the House Judiciary Committee in favor of removing church-state separation from the Bill of Rights. McConnell is all for teaching creationism in public schools, writing in the Brigham Young University Law Review in 1993 that excluding such teachings 'is to privilege the Darwinian orthodoxy and to shelter it from critical evaluation.'
J. MICHAEL LUTTIG: A Texas native who worked in the Justice Department during the first Bush administration, Luttig was named to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1991. Like Wilkinson, Luttig graduated from the University of Virginia law school and takes the same deferential view toward authority. Sitting with Wilkinson, he dissented from the Wilkinson-led majority on Hamdi, claiming the lower court had erred in supporting the Bush administration because it relied partly on a statement by Hamdi's father that his son had been captured in battle. It was wrong to rely on such a statement, said Luttig, and the court should only have considered evidence from the military. Luttig clerked for Warren Burger and later for Scalia. He was an assistant White House counsel during the early Reagan years, then worked in the Justice Department. Luttig's name is widely known because of a personal tragedy: The judge's father was shot dead in a carjacking, and the son helped track down the killers. Members of the Supreme Court had to recuse themselves in a death penalty challenge involving the killer because of knowing Luttig. He wrote an opinion striking down the Violence Against Women Act on grounds that Congress had overstepped its authority. In 1998, he reversed a lower-court ruling and upheld a state ban on so-called partial-birth abortion. He supported a law permitting Virginia to notify parents before an underage teen got an abortion. And he was a supporter of capital punishment long before his father was killed.
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Dark horses
JOHN ROBERTS: A D.C. Appeals Court judge, Roberts clerked for William Rehnquist, worked in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, and went into private practice during the Clinton years. He made it to the D.C. court in 2003. Many liberals think Roberts may be a sign of what's to come. They grew nervous with his dissents challenging the constitutionality of the Endangered Species Act and because of his support of the White House decision to keep the Cheney energy task force records secret.
EDITH JONES: A judge on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, she is perhaps best known for a decision claiming that the federal government could not restrict distribution of Louisiana's 'Choose Life' license plates. She was appointed by Reagan.
ALBERTO GONZALES: The attorney general and former White House counsel, where he was prominent in OK'ing torture in Iraq prisons, he's the best known of several Hispanic possibilities.
SAMUEL ALITO JR.: A judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, out of Philadelphia, who is sometimes referred to as 'Scalito' because of his copycat thinking. He is known for a decision limiting hate speech restrictions.
MIGUEL ESTRADA: A Federalist Society member, Estrada was nominated to a federal judgeship by George W. Bush, but his name was withdrawn because of his lack of qualifications.
EMILIO MILLER GARZA: Another judge from the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.
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Political appointees
THEODORE OLSON: Other than Gonzales, the leading judge candidate among political appointees is Olson, who argued Bush's election case before the Supreme Court in 2000 and was rewarded with an appointment as solicitor general. Olson, whose wife, Barbara, was on the plane that rammed the Pentagon on 9-11, is a veteran lawyer for presidents. He worked for Reagan, representing him on the Iran-Contra scandal, and is a well-known figure in the conservative political community, having headed the D.C. chapter of the Federalist Society. A former partner of Kenneth Starr's, Olson assisted in Paula Jones's legal case against Bill Clinton, represented Whitewater figure David Hale in hearings before the Congress, and was involved in the Arkansas Project. Olson also unsuccessfully defended the Virginia Military Institute's ban on women, fought for the Colorado initiative that would have barred cities and towns from passing gay rights statutes, and won a case that overturned affirmative action admissions policies at the University of Texas law school.
LARRY THOMPSON: Bush's former deputy attorney general and the Bush administration's highest-ranking black law-enforcement official until he quit in 2003, Thompson joined the Brookings Institution as senior fellow and later became general counsel at Pepsi.
JUSTICES BACK CASTLE ROCK
MOM CAN'T SUE COPS IN FAILURE TO PREVENT 3 DAUGHTERS' SLAYING
Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO)
June 28, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
The U.S. Supreme Court comforted police officers but distressed groups fighting domestic violence Monday, ruling that a mother can't sue Castle Rock police for failing to stop her estranged husband from killing her three young daughters.
"This woman has lost everything, and she has lost again," Randy Saucedo, advocacy director for the Colorado Coalition Against Domestic Violence, said at a morning news conference.
But Tom Rice, who represented Castle Rock, said the Supreme Court's ruling relieved law enforcement officers everywhere.
"The Supreme Court understood our argument that law enforcement discretion is paramount, that officers must be free to make choices . . . without fear of being unfairly second-guessed," Rice said.
The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in favor of Castle Rock's police officers. The justices said that Colorado's law on restraining orders requires officers simply to make "reasonable efforts" to enforce them.
Lawyers for the mother had argued that she had a "property right" under the Constitution's 14th Amendment, which guarantees due process for all, to have the restraining order enforced. The court ruled that no such right exists, pointing out that police have to make difficult decisions with limited resources.
Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the opinion for the majority, which included Chief Justice William Rehn-quist as well as Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer.
Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsberg dissented. They said Colorado's law, like many passed by other states in the 1980s and 1990s, was specifically intended to overcome police reluctance to enforce restraining orders in domestic violence cases.
Three girls killed
The Castle Rock mother, Jessica Gonzales, had contended that the police refused, despite repeated requests on the night of June 22, 1999, to enforce a restraining order she had obtained against her husband, Simon Gonzales.
Simon Gonzales vanished for hours that night after taking the girls from their mother's home without her knowledge. At one point, he called his wife to say he and their children were at Six Flags Elitch Gardens in Denver. In the wee hours of the morning, he drove to the Castle Rock police station. There, he opened fire with a gun he had just purchased and died in a shootout with officers.
The girls, Rebecca, 10, Katheryn, 8, and Leslie, 7 - whom a neighbor called "three peas in a pod" - were found dead inside Simon Gonzales' father's truck.
"I will continue to raise awareness around this issue so that my daughters will not have died in vain," Jessica Gonzales, who now lives in California, said in a statement distributed by the American Civil Liberties Union. "We need to put pressure on our elected officials to pass laws that offer real protection to women and their families."
The tearful mother, in a later appearance on ABC's World News Tonight, called the ruling "a slap in the face" for all victims who seek police protection.
"I'm devastated," Gonzales said. "I am so sad for everybody. . . . The last thing you want to do is get a restraining order and think you're safe. Because you're absolutely not."
Both sides had pinned high hopes on the outcome of the case.
Advocates against domestic violence had seen a ruling for Gonzales as crucial to protect the rights - and lives - of victims.
Law enforcement officials had seen a ruling for Castle Rock as necessary to their ability to make on- the-job decisions without the paralyzing anxiety of possibly costly lawsuits.
Rice said Monday that Simon Gonzales had no history of violence. Jessica Gonzales obtained a restraining order against him to stop him from making harassing telephone calls to her.
The order prohibited Simon Gonzales from harassing his wife or the girls and required him to stay away from their home. It was amended later, however, so the girls could spend two weeks with their father every summer and have pre-arranged midweek dinners.
Advocacy groups have long argued that domestic violence is a crime that escalates over time, and Monday, they called upon legislators to respond to the ruling with laws that have more teeth.
The National Network to End Domestic Violence urged Congress to strengthen and re-enact the Violence Against Women Act before it expires Sept. 30. The act funds state and local law enforcement responses to domestic violence, including money to better enforce restraining orders.
"These life-saving programs should not be allowed to expire, but they will if Congress does not act now," the network said.
The ACLU said the ruling makes clear that state legislatures must pass laws ensuring that police will take domestic violence restraining orders seriously.
"We urge state legislatures to act with due haste to protect women and their families from harm," said Lenora Lapidus, director of the ACLU Women's Rights Project.
Saucedo, at the news conference in Denver, said advocates against domestic violence now fear that police won't take court-issued restraining orders seriously. He urged people who have obtained restraining orders to talk to a police supervisor or internal affairs investigator if they feel they are being disregarded.
'Court has spoken'
Castle Rock Police Chief Tony Lane said Monday that officers always have taken restraining orders seriously, including the one in the Gonzales case.
"But we have to deal with the facts that are known to the officers at the time," he said.
He said officers went to Jessica Gonzales' home immediately after she called them to report her daughters missing, about two hours after she noticed they were gone. The police tried to reach her husband and searched the town for him and the girls, Lane said.
Officers did not go to Elitch Gardens or ask Denver police to look there for Simon Gonzales, he said, because only four Castle Rock officers were on duty that night and Jessica Gonzales told officers she didn't think her husband would hurt the girls.
"The Supreme Court has spoken," Lane said. "We're satisfied with the situation."
He said Castle Rock officers learned from the Gonzales murders.
"I certainly think it will help us deal with victims in the future, and maybe look at it in a different way, to realize the potential of these cases," Lane said.
He called the three girls' deaths "one of the worst tragedies and crimes that this community has seen."
"But it's time to move on," he said.
INFOBOX
'Three peas in a pod'
The Gonzales sisters were remembered after their deaths as being inseparable. But each girl had a distinctive style of her own, reflected in her clothing, hobbies and personality. In a June 1999 Rocky Mountain News story, on the day of a heartbreaking funeral, family members described three unique girls from Castle Rock who shared a common bond.
* Rebecca Gonzales, 10
The oldest of the three, Rebecca was "a little mother hen for her sisters," according to mother Jessica Gonzales. "She put their earrings in; she helped them choose their clothes."
Rebecca was called "Gorgeous" by her family because she loved to comb her hair and play with makeup. She paraded her rabbit, Kiki, around the neighborhood in a velvet-lined wagon.
Rebecca was buried in a green velvet dress, wearing an angel pendant with the angel holding a forget-me-not flower.
* Katheryn Gonzales, 8
The middle child, Katheryn Gonzales was nicknamed "Attitude" by family members.
"She had this look on her face that she was someone to be reckoned with," said aunt Tommy Rivera.
In a photo with the three girls on a motorcycle, it was Katheryn who sat in the driver's seat holding the handlebars.
She was not shy when it came to fashion, either.
"Katheryn loved colors, and she didn't mind using 150 at once in her wardrobe," Rivera said.
Before the funeral, her aunts painted Katheryn's fingernails bright pink and gave her a backpack filled with sweets because she had such a sweet tooth.
* Leslie Gonzales, 7
Jessica Gonzales said that when talking to her daughter Leslie, you couldn't tell she was the youngest.
"She was like 7 going on 30, very perceptive," Gonzales said. "You could not get anything by that one."
Family members called Leslie "Little One" or "Lulu." A family friend once described how Leslie would yell, "Catch me" and then run and jump into someone's arms, trusting she would be caught. She loved to make jokes and collected Beanie Babies.
At the funeral, Leslie wore a friendship bracelet that she and her sisters had made for each other.
Bush gets chance he has waited for
President eager to install a justice who shares his ideals, ensures his legacy
THE RETIREMENT OF SANDRA DAY O'CONNOR
Sun, The (Baltimore, MD)
July 2, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
WASHINGTON - The news President Bush had been anticipating since he took office more than four years ago came during lunch, shrouded in secrecy.
The Supreme Court had a sealed envelope to deliver to the White House, Bush was told over lunch with Vice President Dick Cheney in the president's private dining room Thursday. No word on whom it was from.
But there was little mystery about what it would say.
Bush knew then that he was about to get his long-awaited chance to make a Supreme Court nomination - the first in more than a decade - and to put his stamp on the judiciary, cementing a central element of his legacy.
He wouldn't learn until the next morning that he would be replacing Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, rather than her more conservative, ailing 80-year-old colleague, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, whose retirement plans were the stuff of rampant speculation.
Emotional chat
"I wish I was there to hug you," Bush told O'Connor over the phone yesterday from the Oval Office, in what aides called an emotional chat, after he got the official word about 9 a.m. that it was she who planned to step down. "For an old ranch girl, you turned out pretty good."
Bush told O'Connor, who was born in El Paso, Texas, and raised on an Arizona ranch, that she was "one of the great Americans," according to Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, who recounted the roughly five-minute call. "You cannot believe how much Laura and I admire you," Bush said.
Less then 10 minutes later, Bush was huddled with his top advisers, plotting a strategy for choosing O'Connor's replacement - a process that could bitterly divide Republicans and Democrats, carry lasting political consequences for both parties, and ultimately change the ideological bent of the highest court in the land.
Bush won't name his Supreme Court choice until after he returns next Friday from a trip to Europe. He'll study up this weekend at Camp David, and on Air Force One en route to his meetings in Denmark and Scotland, on potential nominees, paging through research compiled by senior aides who have been preparing for years for just such an occasion.
"We have had a plan in place. This is something we prepare for, have been preparing for over the last few years," McClellan said.
Warning of letter
The White House got the call it had been waiting for on Thursday shortly before noon, when Pamela Talkin, the head marshal of the Supreme Court, telephoned Harriet Miers, Bush's counsel, to tell her she had a letter to deliver to the White House.
Miers informed Bush, Cheney and White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr., but the president and his senior staff were left to wonder about its author until just before 9 a.m. yesterday, when Talkin told Miers that the letter "was in reference to Justice O'Connor," McClellan said.
Miers passed the word on to Bush, who gathered Cheney, his political guru Karl Rove and communications director Dan Bartlett in his private dining room to discuss the news.
At 10:18 a.m., Bush was on the phone with O'Connor, and by 10:30, he had summoned the top players in his inner circle - Cheney and the vice president's chief of staff, Lewis I. "Scooter" Libby, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, Miers, Rove, Bartlett and Card - to get down to business.
It's not clear how long Bush will wait to decide on a nominee. Some of his aides are said to be advocating a quick nomination; others are hoping that the president waits until later this summer, leaving potential opponents less time to try to defeat his pick.
Talks with senators
Yesterday Bush was reaching out to senators, including Majority Leader Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican, and Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada, as well as the senior Judiciary Committee leaders, Chairman Orrin G. Hatch of Utah and top Democrat Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, in preparation for a confirmation process that could be the event of the summer.
For now, Bush has a dossier of information to sift through about a list of potential nominees.
White House officials were staying mum yesterday on which names might be in the folder. But speculation on whom Bush would choose has focused on a list of conservative judges who reflect the president's values and the ideology that guides his decisions. Most are baby boomers - insiders and some analysts say Bush wants a justice who will sit for as long as three decades - and some reflect the racial diversity that Bush has made a hallmark of his administration. A few would be deeply controversial, while others could win fairly easy confirmation.
Much more than a routine head-hunt, Bush faces a consequential decision that will be seen as a strong statement of his priorities.
"Bush can go with someone who's strong intellectually, strong philosophically, or he could use this to try to shore up a political base," said Bruce Fein, a Justice Department official in the Reagan administration. "He looks at `How can this individual be trusted in the future to address issues that we can't perceive or predict right now?' There's no algorithm - there's no cookie-cutter approach."
If Bush wants to squeeze maximum political and legacy-building mileage out of the vacancy, many believe he will choose Gonzales, who would be the first Hispanic on the court. A trusted confidant with a compelling personal story - he's the Mexican-American son of migrant workers who worked his way up to Harvard Law School - the 49-year-old could be difficult for Democrats to oppose.
But he is regarded with suspicion by some core conservatives who worry that he would be unreliable on the issues that are most important to them, in part because of past opinions in which he sided with teens seeking to bypass a law requiring that minors notify their parents before getting an abortion.
Young conservative
For a more dependable conservative, Bush could turn to J. Michael Luttig, 51, another Texas native - now a judge on the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals - who is a darling of conservative interest groups, with unrivaled bona fides among Bush's base. A Luttig appointment would likely trigger an outcry among Democrats, who fear that he would seek to restrict abortion rights and civil rights. They point with concern to his opinions, including one in 2000 that struck down parts of the Violence Against Women Act that allowed victims of gender-motivated violence to bring claims in federal court.
Slightly less controversial but just as conservative would be John Roberts, 50, a judge on the District of Columbia appellate court who clerked for Rehnquist and worked for Republican administrations and in the private sector arguing cases before the Supreme Court.
Roberts, who is considered among the most gifted of advocates to appear before the court, has been openly disdainful of abortion rights, writing a brief in 1990, while working as solicitor general for President George H.W. Bush, that urged the Supreme Court to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing them.
But Roberts is regarded as something of a "blank-slate" candidate because he has been a judge for only two years.
A more experienced judge, J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the 4th Circuit, a courtly Southerner, has written enough opinions to illustrate clearly how he thinks about the law and the Constitution. Wilkinson is an old-school, mainline conservative whom legal analysts view as more measured in his philosophy than some of the younger contenders who are popular with the religious right. But at 61, he might be too old to appeal to Bush as a lasting voice on the court.
Bush "has never made a Supreme Court appointment before, and they are unique," said Todd Gaziano of the Heritage Foundation. "No one can say, based on anything he has done his entire life, that they have a clear idea of what he wants to do."
ASSAULT ON FAMILY SUBVERTS FREEDOM
Watertown Daily Times (NY)
Author: KATHLEEN PARKER, Orlando Sentinel
July 5, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
IF YOU were a Big Picture sort gazing at America through a wide-angle lens, you might begin to wonder: Why the big rush to fascism?
For a nation that prides itself on freedom, even seeking to infect other countries, we're terribly busy undermining our own.
How? Specifically, by destroying the family.
Sanctity aside, the traditional family is the front-line defense of liberty, the Maginot Line against creeping totalitarianism. Without the primary, autonomous unit of mother and father - whose duty is to protect and nurture their offspring - government inevitably intercedes.
Indeed, it is a goal of totalitarian governments to supplant the family by undermining parental authority, which Americans and other Westerners seem increasingly willing to surrender. Gluttons for irony, we surrender freedom in the name of freedom - as in liberty and equality for all.
Talk about unintended consequences.
This family dissolution has been gradual and incremental, occurring almost without our notice. First, we demonized men and made women into martyrs and victims. We didn't do this halfheartedly, but with gusto. We codified the concept "men bad, women good" with laws that gave women supremacy over men: child custody awards in divorce; acceptance of drive-by, sperm-bank impregnation and single motherhood; and finally, special status in new laws such as the "Violence Against Women Act."
Violence against women, though indefensible, is presumably no more unacceptable a crime than violence against men. Nevertheless, we created a special law just for women - funded by taxpayers - that institutionalized female victimhood and cemented the image of man as predator.
Then, we turned child-rearing over to day-care workers and public institutions where parental control over the moral content of their children's lives has been diluted. From sex education to diversity training, public educators increasingly have decided what and when children should learn, sometimes without parental approval.
There's nothing wrong with teaching children about human reproduction, assuming information is phase-appropriate. But human reproduction is taught values-free because there is no secular moral consensus that fits all families' cultures.
Nor is there anything wrong with teaching tolerance for other cultures, except it is often done at the expense of covering Western Civ. An odd omission for a nation trying to export Western principles. Meanwhile, public education dumbs itself down for the least common denominator. One pregnant 11-year-old in a school means that all 11-year-olds should know the fine points of sex.
Thus, parents were outraged last month when sixth-graders in Shrewsbury, Mass., were asked various questions about their experiences with oral sex in a survey designed to help educators plan health education programs.
Finally, we "advance" toward the "de-institutionalization" of marriage, as David Blankenhorn (president of the Institute of American Values and author of "Fatherless America") recently described the move toward same-sex marriage (SSM). As SSM becomes the law of the land in other countries (recently Spain and, pending expected senate approval, Canada), and perhaps, inevitably, here, power is being ineluctably shifted from the natural family to the state.
In Canada, Blankenhorn says, the idea of the natural parent has been removed from marriage law and replaced with "legal parent." In New Zealand, a child legally may have three parents. By the logic of same-sex marriage, which insists that marriage is a contract of rights disconnected from sex and procreation, why shouldn't those three parents be allowed to marry? A question being asked by polygamists everywhere.
Viewed simplistically as an equal-rights issue, it's hard to argue against same-sex marriage. We want fairness and equality for all. But viewed historically, marriage isn't an equal-rights issue, nor a legal contract of privileges. The foundational purpose of marriage always has been a bond of duty cementing the affiliation of mother and father to the child.
By separating sex and procreation from marriage - and granting marriage "rights" to anyone and everyone - we are curtailing the rights of children to their natural parents, as well as to protection from the strong arm of the state.
That no family is perfect, that divorce is also an assault on children, that the family is otherwise under siege by irresponsible and self-gratifying heterosexuals is irrefutable. None of those facts justifies further erosion of the original and still-important purpose of securing parents to their dependent offspring.
Today's family portrait as a collage of individual snapshots is not a happy or promising picture: no fathers; single - busy and stressed - mothers; no-fault divorce and "marriage" that means everything and therefore nothing; children depressed and dosed in dumbed-down schools where the least common denominator dictates curriculum.
In such a state, someone has to take charge, for better or worse. When the state takes over, you can bet on worse.
Study finds domestic violence funding not reaching victims
Texarkana Gazette (TX)
July 10, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
LITTLE ROCK - Billions of federal dollars spent to combat domestic violence are not reaching victims and areas of the country with the greatest need, a study from the University of Arkansas has found.
The nationwide research found that women who live in rural areas or poor and minority women do not have equal access to counseling, shelters, legal aid and child-care assistance compared to white women who live in urban and affluent areas.
Most importantly, though, women need legal help and an education, said Amy Farmer, a university economics professor who headed the research.
"We found that legal services are very important because they provide women a long-term solution," Farmer said. "Access to an attorney who can help them keep their kids, restraining orders."
She said in some rural areas public services are not available at all.
Farmer and her team looked at every county in the country to see how $3.3 billion from the Violence Against Women Act was spent. The findings are to be published in the Journal of Marriage and Family.
Because Arkansas is such a rural state, the statistics are telling, said Jayne Ann Kita of Little Rock, executive director of the Arkansas Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
Domestic violence has claimed 14 lives in Arkansas this year, compared to 18 all of last year, Kita said.
"If it continues at this rate, we can come close to doubling," she said. "It's directly related to lack of services."
Isolation is the major problem in rural areas, where there are fewer charities and fundraising opportunities, Kita said.
"They have a farther way to travel to get to help," she said. "They don't have a neighbor next door who hears what's going on. If they don't have a vehicle, it's harder for them to leave because it may be miles and miles for them to walk."
Kelly Browe Olson, who teaches family law and domestic violence at the Bowen School of Law at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, said the federal funding needs to be distributed differently.
She said more than half of the money goes to local police.
"The balance needs to be more on prevention than on prosecution," Olson said. "More of the money needs to go to shelters, education and community outreach."
Farmer said she doesn't believe the government is intentionally distributing the money inequitably. She said because the process caters to areas where there are already domestic violence programs, places where there are no programs are often left out.
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE DATA DECEPTIVE
Lexington Herald-Leader (KY)
July 18, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
The recently published "Family Violence Statistics" report indicating a decline in family violence is hopeful. We should all be encouraged. Our efforts and the resources aided by the Violence Against Women Act are providing solutions.
Still, there are many factors to be considered and much work to be done toward ending violence against women and children in our community.
The rate of family violence fell by more than half between 1993 and 2002, from an estimated 5.4 victims to 2.1 victims per 1,000 U.S. residents age 12 or older, says the report, issued by the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics and Office of Justice Programs.
The figures reflect a general decline in crime, with family violence accounting for 11 percent of all reported and unreported incidents of violence in the same period. But Darlene Thomas, director of the Lexington-based Bluegrass Domestic Violence Program, cautions that victims often keep it secret because they fear being blamed, losing their children and potential reprisal from the perpetrator should they break the silence.
"Domestic violence victims may not report being victims of crime since intimate-partner violence is not viewed by victims as being the same as generalized crime," Thomas says.
"The perpetrator is the same person who claims to love them, not the stranger on the street who commits random acts of violence. Accurately defined questions are imperative to the collection of data regarding domestic violence."
Moreover, all definitions of domestic and family violence are not the same. Definitions of "household member" or "intimate partner" can vary. Some studies define domestic violence to include elder and child abuse, abuse between same-sex partners and dating violence. Some do not. Other definitions exclude unwed couples who live together. If dating violence is included, the definition of "dating" can vary and often excludes minors.
"The harmful dynamics and patterns of interpersonal violence often start early in life," says Gabriela Alcalde, director of the Metro Office for Women in Louisville. "Youth dating abuse is significant but underrepresented, with pervasive and devastating effects on our youth during formative and vulnerable years of their lives. Statistics on youth dating abuse suggest that the percentage of young girls victimized by partners parallels the levels of abuse in adult women."
Service reports published by the Kentucky Domestic Violence Association indicate the state's 15 domestic violence programs sheltered more than 4,000 women and children and provided non-residential services to 22,000 more during the most recent fiscal year.
The Center for Women and Families answered 12,427 calls on its 24-hour crisis line and supplied more than 9,900 legal advocacy sessions during the same period. The association reports that its member programs were unable to shelter more than 2,000 eligible victims.
Association director Sherry Currens says that when communities provide effective support systems, the numbers of reported violence and women seeking services often go up because victims get the message that they will be helped when they disclose abuse.
"The reality is that the problem of domestic violence is still more pervasive than our community responses are often able to accommodate," she says.
The decision Congress makes when it reauthorizes the Violence Against Women Act this year will set priorities and funding levels for years to come. The "Family Violence Statistics" report reminds us that the job is far from done.
The safety most of us take for granted is a right denied to thousands of women and children. We must continue as a society to direct ourselves to the challenges of eliminating the violence.
Jane W. Burks is president of The Center for Women and Families in Louisville.
Saving innocent officers' careers
Daily Breeze (Torrance, CA)
July 19, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
Shot in the line of duty. Twice awarded the Medal of Honor. Named New Jersey Police Officer of the Year. A highly decorated officer with an impeccable record. For 22 years, police officer Eric Washington battled criminals on the streets of East Orange, N.J. On Jan. 21, 2001, Washington was ambushed and brought down -- not by an ex-convict bent on revenge or a shadowy gunman, but instead by a false accusation of domestic violence.
Under the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, individuals, including police officers and armed forces personnel, are prohibited from possessing a firearm if they are subject to a restraining order issued at the behest of a spouse or an intimate partner. The 1996 Domestic Violence Offender Gun Ban expanded this prohibition to bar officers and service personnel from carrying weapons as part of their jobs. As a result, most officers who are hit with restraining orders lose their careers.
Were restraining orders issued as a result of a reasonable proof of guilt, the two laws might make sense. However, according to Elaine Epstein, former president of the Massachusetts Women's Bar Association, restraining orders are doled out "like candy" to "virtually all who apply," and that "in virtually all cases, no notice, meaningful hearing or impartial weighing of evidence is to be had."
A study conducted by Massachusetts courts revealed that the majority of restraining orders did not even involve an allegation of violence. According to a family law attorney in Seattle, "the woman saying she 'feels afraid' of her husband is usually enough. Men have no way to defend themselves against these accusations. Most judges grant restraining orders to any woman who applies for one. ..."
Thus unless the accused can get the order undone at a later hearing -- no easy feat in today's climate -- any police officer's or serviceman's career is one flimsy accusation away from destruction. In some states, officers forfeit their right to possess weapons (and consequently lose their jobs) by the mere fact that a woman has made a police report of domestic violence.
For fathers, the destruction is often double. Since restraining orders are frequently utilized in divorce and child custody battles, falsely accused officers often have their careers destroyed at the very moment they are slapped with stiff child and spousal support obligations, as well as divorce-related legal costs.
Beyond the grave injustices visited upon many innocent men, the current law may also have a negative long-term effect on police and military recruitment. Why should a man risk his safety and devote his life to a career that can be taken away from him at any moment by a flimsy allegation?
Washington's career survived because his department had the resources to provide him with a desk job while he waged his long and ultimately successful legal fight to clear himself. Most officers aren't so fortunate.
Former Torrance police officer John Brumbaugh recently won a seven-year legal battle after an ex-girlfriend falsely accused him of battery. Though Brumbaugh's conviction was overturned and his name finally cleared, the false charges cost him his career as a police officer and several hundred thousand dollars in legal expenses and lost wages and benefits.
The Violence Against Women Act expires in September and legislation to renew it for five years was recently introduced by Senators Joseph Biden, D-Del., Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Arlen Specter, R-Penn. In hearings beginning today, the Senate Judiciary Committee will consider various amendments to include in the law's reauthorization.
The committee should repeal the Domestic Violence Offender Gun Ban and provide that men with restraining orders against them can still possess department-issued firearms for the purposes of their employment.
The principle of ensuring that officers are of solid character is a good one. What is lacking in current law is a reasonable standard for punitive action. The findings of police department investigations and criminal convictions are reasonable standards. The issuance of restraining orders is not.
Glenn Sacks serves on the advisory board of Stop Abuse for Everyone, an international domestic violence organization. He is also a nationally syndicated talk show host.
Time to dispose of radical feminist pork
Intelligencer, The (Doylestown, PA)
July 20, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
If Republicans are looking for a way to return to their principles of limited government and reduced federal spending, a good place to start would be rejection of the coming reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act sponsored by Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del.
It's a mystery why Republicans continue to put a billion dollars a year of taxpayers' money into the hands of radical feminists who use it to preach their anti-marriage and anti-male ideology, promote divorce, corrupt the family court system, and engage in liberal political advocacy.
Accountability is supposed to be the watchword of the Bush administration, but there's been no accountability or oversight for the act's spending of many billions of dollars. There is no evidence that the Violence Against Women Act has benefited anyone except the radical feminists on its payroll.
The Senate Judiciary Committee, which is gearing up for a battle royal over the Supreme Court vacancy, has scheduled a hearing on the act for mid-July. It's apparently designed as a be-nice-to-Biden-before-the court-fight event, since no critic has been invited to speak.
Let's have a reality check. The Violence Against Women Act's gender-specific title is pejorative: it's based on the false, unscientific, unjust and blatantly offensive premise that men are innately violent and abusive toward women, making all women victims of men.
The president of Harvard University was publicly pilloried for months earlier this year for implying innate differences between men and women. But the act is spending a billion dollars a year to inculcate that very notion in the minds of men and women who are having marital difficulties, as well as police, prosecutors, psychologists and family court judges.
Feminists staged tantrums at the suggestion of innate math-aptitude differences between men and women, but the whole premise of the Violence Against Women Act is that men have an innate propensity to violence against women. It's not because some are bad individuals or drunks or psychologically troubled, but because men want to keep women subservient in an oppressive patriarchal society.
The Violence Against Women Act was passed using such bogus statistics as "a woman is beaten every 15 seconds" and "80 percent of fathers who seek custody of their children fit the profile of a batterer." Remember the Super Bowl hoax, the ridiculous claim that "the biggest day of the year for violence against women" is Super Bowl Sunday? It's an assertion conclusively refuted by Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers' research.
The Violence Against Women Act comes out of Andrea Dworkin's tirades of hate such as, "Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman." The act comes out of Gloria Steinem's nonsense, such as "the patriarchy requires violence or the subliminal threat of violence in order to maintain itself."
Here is some mischief in act-funded activities that should be investigated in the coming Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
The act refuses to provide any help whatsoever for male victims of domestic violence. Let's hear from professor Martin Fiebert of California State University at Long Beach who compiled a bibliography of 170 scholarly investigations, 134 empirical studies and 36 analyses, which demonstrate that women are almost as physically abusive toward their partners as men.
The act encourages women to make false allegations, and then petition for full child custody and a denial of all fathers' rights to see their own children.
The act promotes the unrestrained use of restraining orders, which family courts issue on the woman's say-so. This powerful weapon (according to the Illinois Bar Journal) is "part of the gamesmanship of divorce" and virtually guarantees that fathers are expelled from the lives of their own children.
A woman seeking help from an act-funded center is not offered any options except to leave her husband, divorce him, accuse him of being a criminal and have her sons targeted as suspects in future crimes. The Violence Against Women Act ideology rejects joint counseling, reconciliation and saving marriages.
The act denies that alcohol and illegal drugs are a cause of domestic violence, a peculiar assumption contrary to all human experience. In fact, most domestic violence incidents involve those components.
The act uses a definition of domestic violence that blurs the difference between violent action and run-of-the-mill marital tiffs and arguments. Definitions of abuse can even include minor insults and refusing to help with child care or housework.
The act funds the re-education of judges and all law enforcement personnel to teach them feminist stereotypes about male abusers and female victims, how to game the system to empower women, and how to ride roughshod over the constitutional rights of men.
The act forces Soviet-style psychological re-education on men.
The accused men are not given treatment for real problems, but are assigned to classes where feminists teach shame and guilt because of a vast male conspiracy to subjugate women.
The Violence Against Women Act-funded centers engage in political advocacy for feminist legislation such as the "must-arrest" laws even if there is no sign of violence and even if the woman doesn't want the man arrested, and political advocacy against non-feminist legislation such as shared parental rights.
It's time to stop the act from spending any more taxpayers' money to promote family dissolution and fatherless children.
Phyllis Schlafly is a columnist for Copley News Service. Her column appears on Wednesdays.
Ask Congress to repeal VAWA legislation
Courier News (Elgin, IL)
July 21, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
In agreement with Equal Justice Foundation's recent statements regarding the Violence Against Women Act, the American Divorce Association for Men would like to urge your readers to gain awareness on this matter.
In its 11 years as federal law, VAWA has done nothing but plague the civil rights of Americans. VAWA has financially supported, advocated and demanded warrantless mandatory arrests and searches; a presumption of guilt based on hearsay; forcing men from their homes without due process; seizures of property without redress; denying men their rights to counsel, to face their accuser and to have witnesses in their defense; punishment and imprisonment before or without trial; and invoking public censure for crimes men have not committed.
This law has been a failure and an appalling violation of human rights from the beginning.
Since no witnesses opposing the act were allowed to testify in the July 19 Judicial Committee hearings, a call to reform from the public is necessary.
The Congress appears to be representing only the interest groups, many of which are making money in the domestic violence industry and should not be allowed to lobby for corrupt legislation that would further their monetary gains.
The federal government needs to abolish these laws and leave state matters such as domestic violence to the state level. All such laws must be gender-neutral and provide due process and equal protection under the law.
False allegations and subsequent perjuries must be seen as criminal acts, and domestic violence must be taken out of the realm of civil court.
We must act as the government's conscience. Send letters to your congressmen demanding the reform of this horribly corrupt legal act.
Louis Filczer, President American Divorce Association for Men Itasca
Leahy: 'Activist' Nominee Won't Get Vote
Associated Press News Service, The
July 27, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
WASHINGTON (AP) - Top Judiciary Committee Democrat Patrick Leahy of Vermont said he will vote against Supreme Court nominee John Roberts if the judge seems likely to pursue an ''activist'' philosophy. Another Democrat said Roberts assured him he is no ideologue.
In an interview broadcast Tuesday on Vermont Public Radio's ''Switchboard'' program, Leahy said he would vote against the appeals court judge if it seemed as if he would pursue an activist agenda on the court. In selecting Roberts, President Bush emphasized that he was looking for someone who would not legislate from the bench.
Leahy said he's worried that Roberts might try to unravel matters that should be settled law.
Denouncing conservatives on the current court, the Vermont senator said in the interview: ''They have struck down parts of the Violence Against Women Act, environmental acts, child safety legislation.''
''They've knocked down all these, basically writing the law themselves,'' Leahy added. ''I want to find out if he's going to be as active as this - as people like Justice (Antonin) Scalia and Justice (Clarence) Thomas, who have almost willy-nilly overruled things.''
Leahy also said any Supreme Court nominee who doesn't agree that Roe v. Wade is established legal precedent would have difficulty getting confirmed.
''Just as you would not have a justice nominee who said, 'Well I wouldn't consider Brown vs. Board of Education settled law,' I don't see how they could get confirmed,'' Leahy said. ''I don't see how somebody who said that they didn't consider Roe vs. Wade settled law ... I don't see how they get confirmed.''
Roe v. Wade is the 1973 case that established a woman's right to an abortion. Brown v. Board of Education is the 1954 Supreme Court decision that struck down school segregation.
But Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who also sits on the Judiciary panel, said he was assured by Roberts on Tuesday that he would not act as an ideologue if he makes it to the Supreme Court.
''He told me flatly that he is not an ideologue and said that he shares my aversion to ideologues,'' Schumer said in a speech prepared for the National Press Club. ''Furthermore, he said I could repeat that publicly - that he is not an ideologue.''
Meanwhile, senators sparred anew Wednesday over when confirmation hearings should begin. Democrats continued to push for more documents that could reveal the more about his thinking on controversial issues.
As Roberts, 50, continued to make courtesy calls on senators like Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, Senate Republicans and the White House worked to try to assure a confirmation vote before the court begins a new term in early October.
Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said he would convene hearings as early as Aug. 29 if necessary to meet that timetable. A later date - perhaps Sept. 6 - also was possible, he said, if Democrats commit to a confirmation vote before the start of the high court's new term on October 3.
Democrats who are anxious to learn more about Roberts' views say his supporters are trying to push them into holding the confirmation vote before they get all of the paperwork they need. The White House released some of the documents on Tuesday, but Democrats want more, particularly from the time when he worked in the Reagan administration and, later, the administration Bush's father, George H.W. Bush.
Roberts was 26 when he served in the Justice Department as a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith during the Reagan administration. The 1981-82 files released Tuesday by the National Archives paint a picture of a politically savvy attorney who showed some impatience with ''judicial activism.''
One issue Roberts focused on was appeals by prisoners, who in the 1980s had several avenues of challenging their sentences in both state and federal courts. Since then, courts generally have limited prisoners' options, with justices this past term clashing over how closely they should scrutinize death penalty sentences by state courts.
The availability of federal court appeals, ''particularly for state prisoners, goes far to making a mockery of the entire criminal justice system,'' Roberts wrote in a Nov. 12, 1981, memorandum, decrying the endless appeals that ''obscures the rare serious claim.''
Roberts also counseled the Reagan administration against some affirmative action policies, issuing a strong criticism of a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report urging broader use of racial preferences.
He noted that a city police department had recruited minority cadets only to see them fail or drop out. ''There is no recognition of the obvious reason for failure: The affirmative action program required the recruiting of inadequately prepared candidates,'' Roberts wrote.
The White House is invoking attorney-client privilege in withholding legal writings by Roberts when he was principal deputy solicitor general under the first President Bush.
''From what we know now, John Roberts had a hand in some of the most aggressive assaults on civil rights protections during the Reagan administration,'' Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., said.
Committee aides on Tuesday began sifting through the first of thousands of documents to be made available, dating from Roberts' tenure as a special assistant in the Justice Department, and in the White House counsel's office in 1983-86.
As a historical footnote, one memo was hard to beat - a one-page paper in which the young Roberts reported that beginning ''my first day on the job'' he had been helping O'Connor prep for her own confirmation hearings to the high court.
''The approach was to avoid giving specific responses to any direct questions on legal issues likely to come before the court, but demonstrating in the response a firm command of the subject area and awareness of the relevant precedents and arguments,'' Roberts wrote in the Sept. 17, 1981, memo.
Schumer promotes an expanded version of domestic violence act
Times Union, The (Albany, NY)
July 28, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer , calling domestic violence a "dark problem," is pushing a bill in Congress to renew the Violence Against Women Act which is set to expire in September.
Schumer, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a conference call Wednesday with reporters that 207,000 cases of domestic violence were reported to police upstate over the last five years.
"If you average it out, it's 40,000 a year," the senator said, calling the statistic "astounding."
In the Capital Region, there were 45,000 cases. Other areas included 43,000 in the Hudson Valley and 34,000 in Central New York.
Nationally, there are 700,000 victims of domestic violence annually, and studies show 25 percent of women are raped by an intimate partner in their lifetime.
In 1994, Congress "focused the spotlight on this dark problem," Schumer said. Consequently, police became better trained and more aware.
"Friends, neighbors and law enforcement tended to look the other way," he said. "People thought it was a private problem."
The Violence Against Women Act took effect in 1995 and was set to expire in 10 years. Some in Congress said at the time, "Let's see how it works, let's not keep it on the books indefinitely," Schumer said. "Those were the skeptics, but they have been won over."
The new bill would be expanded to provide more grants and support for rural areas and to protect victims and children, he said. Getting victims time off from work for court or to find new living arrangements will be included as well as collaboration between domestic violence experts and child welfare agencies. Incidents of domestic violence in New York have dropped 50 percent and Schumer credits the law. Many of the 207,000 cases outside New York City are repeat offenses, he said.
"When people have a place to go and report it, they can stop recidivism," he said. "Law enforcement knows more now how to handle this ... and there are shelters" for women in abusive situations to go with their children, he said.
Roberts faces new challenge: a clause
It's "the everything clause" of the Constitution. And how this high court nominee interprets it has sparked a controversy.
Tampa Bay Times: Web Edition Articles (FL)
August 2, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
WASHINGTON - Much of the debate about Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. has focused on his views about abortion, but a controversy is brewing about his interpretation of a sentence in the Constitution dubbed "the everything clause."
Known more formally as the Commerce Clause, it's been used to justify countless federal laws covering everything from civil rights to endangered species.
For many conservatives, the clause has long been a sore point. They believe Congress and the courts have interpreted it too broadly, leading to sweeping federal regulations that the Founding Fathers never intended.
Democrats and liberal groups say Roberts' opinion in a quirky case involving California toads suggests he sides with the conservatives, has a narrow view of the clause and would strike down many federal laws.
"That theory could substantially cut back Congress' power," said Elliot Mincberg, vice president and legal director of the liberal group People for the American Way. "It could mean significantly limiting the ability of Congress to pass laws protecting civil rights, safety and the environment - and throwing out laws that already do that."
Some Roberts supporters disagree and say his comments in the toad case might simply reflect his discipline following Supreme Court precedents. But other supporters say they hope he has a narrow interpretation because they believe the federal government, with the blessing of the Supreme Court, has used the clause to regulate too much.
"I think Congress has gone ape and out of control," said Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss. "I would hope the Supreme Court would rule on the Commerce Clause very narrowly."
The impact of wheat
When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, they were more worried about trade than toads.
States were charging tariffs on goods from outside their borders, stifling interstate trade. The authors of the Constitution wanted to eliminate the trade barriers.
The Commerce Clause was born. It said Congress could "regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes."
"The main meaning was to remove impediments," said Gary Galles, an economics professor at Pepperdine University.
The Founding Fathers had no idea the clause might someday be used to justify federal regulations.
"The federal government they were planning was so limited that nobody worried that the federal government would tell everybody what to do," Galles said.
But a series of Supreme Court decisions in the 1800s and 1900s dramatically broadened the interpretation of the clause. The justices said the clause gave Congress authority to regulate meatpacking, child labor, racial discrimination and many other areas because they all had some connection with interstate commerce.
The definition of interstate commerce was stretched to extremes.
In one famous 1942 case, the court said Congress could hold farmers to a wheat quota even if it was grown and consumed on the same farm. The court said the wheat still could have "a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce."
Both political parties have used the clause to justify dozens of federal laws.
"The whole foundation of federal regulation since the early 1900s has been on the basis of the Commerce Clause," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.
But some conservatives bristle at the broad interpretation of a sentence that originally had a narrow purpose. They say that the courts should not grant such sweeping authority and that if Congress wants more power to regulate, it should pass a constitutional amendment.
"I believe the Founding Fathers would be shocked at the use of the Commerce Clause to address partial-birth abortion, Terri Schiavo, the Violence Against Women Act" and many other issues, said Bruce Fein, a constitutional lawyer.
The "hapless toad'
A few years ago, Rancho Viejo, a real estate developer, wanted to build a 202-acre housing development in San Diego. But the homes happened to be in the middle of a habitat for the arroyo southwestern toad, an endangered species known for wandering long distances after mating season.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service determined that the development would "jeopardize the continued existence" of the toad, largely because a fence built by Rancho Viejo kept the toads from traveling to their breeding grounds. But the developer refused to remove the fence and challenged the law, saying the government had exceeded federal powers under the Commerce Clause.
A three-judge panel on the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals said the government had the right to protect the toad even though there appeared to be a weak case for interstate commerce: The animal was not found outside California, and Rancho Viejo's development is entirely within the state. The judges cited previous court decisions that broadly interpreted the Commerce Clause, noting that the homes would rely on materials and construction workers from outside the state.
Rancho Viejo appealed, asking for a rehearing before all nine judges in the D.C. Circuit, but the judges voted 7-2 to deny the motion.
Roberts was one of the two dissenters. He wrote that the refusal to take a second look at the case "seems inconsistent" with two Supreme Court decisions in 1995 and 2000 on the Commerce Clause. Those rulings struck down federal laws to protect women from violence and keep schools free of guns because there was no direct link with interstate commerce.
Roberts said his fellow appellate judges were saying their decision was justified by the Commerce Clause, which applies to interstate commerce, even though the "the hapless toad" was found only in California.
What was he thinking?
Roberts has not spoken publicly since he was nominated, so legal analysts looking for clues into his beliefs must rely on his judicial rulings (he's been a judge for only two years) and memos and letters from his jobs in the Reagan administration (1981-86) and the first Bush administration (1989-93).
So far, the toad case offers the only significant clue about his feelings on the Commerce Clause. But his opinion is only four paragraphs long.
So does Roberts believe the Commerce Clause has been used too broadly? Or is he just following precedents?
David Bookbinder, a senior attorney at the Sierra Club, said the opinion indicates Roberts was "reaching out to create a constitutional issue where most people would not see one."
Mincberg of People for the American Way said: "We can't say for sure because it was one opinion in one case. But what's troubling about his comment about the hapless toad living its life in one state seems to support the theory" that Roberts wants a narrow interpretation of the clause.
Fein, who worked with Roberts in the Reagan administration, said the toad opinion reflects Roberts' approach to rely strictly on the text of the laws and the Constitution.
"John takes the view that you look at the words and the purpose of the particular clause and you apply it to the facts of the case at hand," Fein said.
"He doesn't say he is unhappy because he thinks the federal government is a leviathan and it's stupid what they are doing. The reason he's unhappy is because we are adding embellishments to the Constitution that aren't there."
The Philosopher-Justice - Farewell Rehnquist, move over Scalia
New Republic, The (USA)
September 19, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
ACTIVE LIBERTY: INTERPRETING OUR DEMOCRATIC CONSTITUTION By Stephen Breyer (Knopf, 176 pp., $21)
I.
William H. Rehnquist has died, and John G. Roberts Jr. has been nominated to replace him, and another nomination is still to come: it is an understatement to say that the Supreme Court is in a period of transition. The change of personnel is taking place among conservatives of one kind or another, according to the wishes of a deeply conservative president. Yet all this must not obscure the fact that conservatism on the Court is about to encounter a serious challenge. With this small but important book, Justice Stephen Breyer emerges as a leading theorist of constitutional interpretation on the highest bench in the land. At last there has appeared a direct and substantial challenge, within the Court, to the constitutional thought of Justice Antonin Scalia, who has long offered an ambitious and forceful account about how to approach the Constitution and laws of the United States. For the next decade, I think, much of the intellectual battle, within the Court and within the nation, will have to be conducted with close reference to the conflict between the starkly different constitutional theories of Scalia and Breyer. The impact of President Bush's appointments notwithstanding, liberalism is finally, at the level of ideas, pushing back.
Breyer and Scalia begin with a shared appreciation of the fact that the justices of the Supreme Court are unelected and serve for life. Since the Court has the power to invalidate the decisions of the elected branches, it is not so easy to reconcile the magnitude of its power with the national commitment to democratic self-rule. Throughout the nation's history, many of the most prominent constitutional theorists have tried to resolve this apparent contradiction. They have argued that if the Court acts in a certain way, it can coexist comfortably with democracy after all.
Late in the nineteenth century, James Bradley Thayer argued that the Supreme Court should strike down legislation only "when those who have the right to make laws have not merely made a mistake, but have made a very clear one,--so clear that it is not open to rational question." In Thayer's view, "whatever choice is rational is constitutional." Thayer argued that the Supreme Court should uphold the actions of the elected branches unless the invalidity of their decisions is "very plain and clear, clear beyond a reasonable doubt." Thayer had an influence on Oliver Wendell Holmes, perhaps the greatest figure in the history of American law, who generally agreed with his plea for judicial deference to the legislature. And in the period after Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, Thayer's approach had a significant role on the Supreme Court, embraced as it generally was by Holmes's disciple Felix Frankfurter. William Rehnquist was himself no theorist, but he showed occasional impulses in Thayer's direction.
The idea of deference to the elected branches lost much of its appeal in the 1950s and 1960s, when the Supreme Court, under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, was invalidating school segregation, protecting freedom of speech, striking down poll taxes, requiring a rule of one person, one vote, and protecting accused criminals against police abuse. Is it possible to defend the Warren Court against the charge that its decisions were fatally undemocratic? The most elaborate effort came from John Hart Ely, who argued for what he called a "representation-reinforcing" approach to judicial review. Like Thayer, Ely emphasized the central importance of democratic self-rule; but he insisted that if self-rule is really our lodestar, then unqualified judicial deference to legislatures is utterly senseless. Some rights, Ely argued, are indispensable to self-rule, and the Court legitimately protects those rights not in spite of democracy but in its very name.
The right to vote and the right to speak were Ely's central examples. Courts promote democracy when they protect those rights. And Ely went further. He argued that some groups are at a systematic disadvantage in the democratic process, and that when courts protect "discrete and insular minorities," they are therefore strengthening democracy, too. Ely was particularly concerned with African Americans, whom he saw as frequently unable to protect themselves in politics. But with some qualifications, his plea for judicial protection could be extended to women and gays and lesbians as well.
A third theory of constitutional interpretation, espoused most prominently by Scalia and also favored by Clarence Thomas, is known as "originalism." Originalists believe that the Constitution should be interpreted to mean exactly what it meant at the time that it was ratified. If the Equal Protection Clause was originally understood to permit sex discrimination, then courts should permit sex discrimination. If the Second Amendment was originally understood to forbid gun control, then courts should forbid gun control. When President Bush praises "strict construction," many people take him to be embracing originalism. Originalists such as Scalia reject Thayer's approach, because they are quite prepared to strike down legislation that violates the original understanding. They are mystified by Ely's idea of "representation-reinforcing" judicial review. But originalists, too, prize democracy. They emphasize that the Constitution was ratified by "We the People," who have sovereign authority, and they want to limit the discretion of federal judges, who are after all not elected. It is true that those who ratified the Constitution are long dead, and this point creates a substantial problem for originalists; but democracy is nonetheless central to originalist thinking about constitutional law.
As a professor at Harvard Law School, Stephen Breyer specialized in administrative law and regulatory policy. Constitutional law was not his field. As a member of the Supreme Court, however, Breyer has gradually been developing a distinctive constitutional approach of his own, one that can be seen as directly responsive to Scalia and originalism. This book announces and develops that theory. In so doing, it constitutes a major challenge not only to Scalia's principles and methods, but also to the legacy of Rehnquist, with his strongly conservative inclinations. Appearing when the Supreme Court is in transition, and when the national debate about the Court and the Constitution has degenerated into a war of slogans, Breyer's timing is uncanny.
Breyer's major theme is "active liberty," which he associates with the right of self-governance. In his own judicial work, Breyer might indeed be seen as the most consistently democratic member of the Rehnquist Court: among its nine members, he has shown the highest percentage of votes to uphold acts of Congress and to defer to the decisions of the executive branch. But Breyer does not mean to follow Thayer: he does not believe that the Court should uphold legislation whenever the Constitution is unclear. Like Ely, Breyer wants the courts to take an aggressive role in some areas, above all in order to protect democratic governance.
His book comes in three parts. The first builds on Benjamin Constant's famous distinction between the liberty of the ancients and the liberty of the moderns. The liberty of the ancients involves "active liberty"--the right to share in the exercise of sovereign power. Quoting Constant, Breyer refers to the hope that the sharing of that power would "ennoble" the people's "thoughts and establish among them a kind of intellectual equality which forms the glory and power of a people." But Constant also prized negative liberty, meaning "individual independence" from government authority. In Constant's view, which Breyer firmly endorses, it is necessary to have both forms of freedom, and thus "to combine the two together."
Breyer believes that the Founders of the Constitution did exactly that. His special emphasis is on what Constant called "an active and constant participation in collective power." That form of participation includes voting, town meetings, and the like; but it also requires that citizens receive information and education, so as to promote their capacity to ensure effective governance. In Breyer's account, the citizens of post-revolutionary America insisted on highly democratic forms of state government, promoting popular control. Notwithstanding the ambivalent experiences of post-revolutionary governments, the Founders of the Constitution accepted the deepest aspirations of the American revolutionaries, creating a framework with a "basically democratic outlook." The document begins, as it happens, with the words, "We the People," and in Breyer's view its very structure is a testimonial to active liberty. Both the House and the Senate are subject to electoral control. Even with the electoral college, the choice of the president is ultimately traceable to voters, not to an unaccountable elite. Breyer believes that this entire system is "difficult to reconcile with a retreat from democratic principle."
Quite the contrary. Breyer claims that the Constitution can be viewed "as focusing upon active liberty." He thinks that constitutional interpretation should be undertaken with close reference to that central constitutional purpose. In his account, the Warren Court appreciated active liberty, and it attempted to make that form of liberty more real for all Americans. The Rehnquist Court, by contrast, may have pushed the pendulum too far back in the other direction.
So Breyer believes that an appreciation of the idea of active liberty has concrete implications for a wide range of modern disputes, and the second part of his book traces those implications. He begins with free speech. An obvious question is whether the Court should be hostile or receptive to campaign finance reform. With his eye directly on the democratic ball, Breyer suggests that if we focus on the Constitution's basic structural objective, "participatory self-government," then we will be receptive to restrictions on campaign contributions. A central reason is that such restrictions "seek to democratize the influence that money can bring to bear upon the electoral process." He thinks that some of his colleagues, most prominently Rehnquist and Scalia, have been mistaken to invoke negative liberty as a rigid barrier to campaign finance restrictions. In the same vein, he insists that the principle of free speech, regarded from the standpoint of active liberty, gives special protection to political speech, and significantly less protection to commercial advertising. He criticizes his colleagues on the Court for protecting advertising with such aggressiveness in recent years. Breyer's interpretation of freedom of speech emphasizes democratic self-government above all.
Affirmative action might seem to have little to do with active liberty. At first glance, it poses a conflict between the ideal of color-blindness and what Breyer calls a "narrowly purposive" understanding of the Equal Protection Clause, one that emphasizes the historical mistreatment of African Americans. Directly disagreeing with Scalia and Rehnquist, Breyer tends toward the narrowly purposive approach. But he also contends that in permitting affirmative action at educational institutions, the Court has been directly concerned with democratic self-government. The reason is plain: "some form of affirmative action" is "necessary to maintain a well-functioning participatory democracy." Breyer points to the Court's emphasis on the role of broad access to education in "sustaining our political and cultural heritage" and in promoting diverse leadership. Underlining those points, Breyer argues that the Court's decision to permit affirmative action made a direct appeal "to principles of solidarity, to principles of fraternity, to principles of active liberty." In Breyer's view, it should be no surprise that the Court selected an interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause that would promote, rather than undermine, the operation of democracy.
With respect to privacy, Breyer's emphasis is on the novelty of new technologies and the rise of unanticipated questions about how to balance law enforcement needs against the interest in keeping personal information private. Owing to the novelty and the difficulty of those problems, Breyer argues for "a special degree of judicial modesty and caution." He wants to avoid a "premature judicial decision" that would risk "short-circuiting, or pre-empting, the 'conversational' law-making process." Hence his plea is for narrow and careful judicial rulings that do not lay out long-term solutions. In Breyer's view, such rulings serve active liberty, because they refuse to "limit legislative options in ways now unforeseeable." By its very nature, a narrow ruling is unlikely to "interfere with any ongoing democratic policy debate." His argument here is important, because other members of the Court, notably Scalia, have objected to such narrow rulings on the ground that they leave too much uncertainty for the future. For Breyer, such uncertainty may be a friend of democracy.
Some of the most noteworthy decisions of the Rehnquist Court have attempted to limit the power of Congress. Here Rehnquist himself was the leader, and the Court has, since the 1990s, adopted positions that he began to press in the 1970s. The Rehnquist Court struck down the Violence Against Women Act, for example, as beyond congressional authority under the Commerce Clause. It also announced an "anti-commandeering" principle, which forbids the national government from requiring state legislatures to enact laws. In the abstract, these decisions seem to promote active liberty, because they decrease the authority of the more remote national government, and because they promote participation and self-government at the local level. Breyer agrees that the federal system fits with his general theme, since that system makes "it easier for citizens to hold government officials accountable" and brings "government closer to home"; but he strongly objects to the Rehnquist Court's federalism decisions. With respect to congressional enactments, he observes that "the public has participated in the legislative process at the national level," and hence the principle of active liberty calls for deference by the Court. Breyer's special target is the anti-commandeering principle. Speaking in pragmatic terms, Breyer thinks that this prohibition precludes valuable initiatives to protect against terrorism, environmental degradation, and natural disasters--initiatives in which, for example, the national government requires state officials to ensure compliance with federal standards.
Breyer also contends that an understanding of active liberty can inform more technical debates. Consider a prominent example. Should courts rely only on a statute's literal text, or should they place an emphasis instead "on statutory purpose and congressional intent"? Sharply disagreeing with the more textually oriented Scalia, Breyer favors purpose and intent. He emphasizes that a purpose-based approach asks courts to consider the goals of "the 'reasonable Member of Congress'--a legal fiction that applies, for example, even when Congress did not in fact consider a particular problem." Breyer thinks that this approach, as compared with a single-minded focus on the literal text, will tend to make the law more sensible. He also contends that it "helps to implement the public's will and is therefore consistent with the Constitution's democratic purpose." Breyer concludes that an emphasis on legislative purpose "means that laws will work better for the people they are presently meant to affect. Law is tied to life; and a failure to understand how a statute is so tied can undermine the very human activity that the law seeks to benefit."
The third part of Breyer's book tackles broader questions of interpretive theory and directly engages Scalia's contrary view. Breyer emphasizes that he means to draw attention to two considerations above all: purposes and consequences. Constitutional provisions, he thinks, have "certain basic purposes," and they should be understood in light of those purposes and the broader democratic goals that infuse the Constitution as a whole. In addition, consequences are "an important yardstick to ensure a given interpretation's faithfulness to these democratic purposes." Breyer is fully aware that many people, including Scalia and Thomas, are drawn to "textualism" and its close cousin "originalism"--approaches that argue in favor of close attention to the meaning of legal terms at the precise time they were enacted. He knows that such people are likely to think that his own approach is an invitation for open-ended judicial lawmaking, in a way that compromises his own democratic aspirations. But he has several responses to such criticisms.
For a start, originalist judges claim to follow history, but they cannot easily demonstrate that history favors their preferred method. The Constitution does not say that it should be interpreted to mean what it meant when it was ratified. The document itself enshrines no particular theory of interpretation. And if originalism cannot be defended by reference to the intentions and the understandings of the Framers, Breyer asks, in what way can it be defended, "other than in an appeal to consequences?" He knows that some of the most sophisticated originalists ultimately argue that their approach will have good consequences--for example, by stabilizing the law and deterring judges from imposing their own views. So even Breyer's originalist adversaries are "consequentialist in an important sense." (Rehnquist himself never squarely endorsed originalism, but his votes generally lined up with his originalist colleagues. His principles of constitutional interpretation will remain unspecified.)
Breyer also argues that his own approach does not at all leave courts at sea, for he, too, insists that judges must take account of "the legal precedents, rules, standards, practices, and institutional understanding that a decision will affect." Those who focus on consequences will not favor frequent or dramatic legal change, simply because stability is important. But the important point is this: to oppose textualism and originalism is hardly to oppose the careful consideration of the Constitution and statutory law. One of the many services performed by Breyer's book is that it should make it difficult, or even impossible, for critics to caricature the anti-originalist position. Moreover, textualism and originalism also cannot avoid the problem of judicial discretion. Their methods do not provide quite the unmediated and value-free inquiry that they imagine. "Which historical account shall we use? Which tradition shall we apply?" In the end, Breyer contends that the real problem with textualism and originalism is that they "may themselves produce seriously harmful consequences--outweighing whatever risks of subjectivity or uncertainty are inherent in other approaches." His ultimate goal is "a framework for democratic government" that will prove workable over time, and he believes that his kind of purposive approach, rooted in active liberty, is most likely to promote that goal.
II.
This is a brisk, lucid, and energetic book, written with conviction and offering a central argument that is at once provocative and appealing. It is not usual for a member of the Supreme Court to attempt to set out a general approach to his job; and Breyer's effort must be ranked among the most impressive of such efforts in the nation's long history. For that reason alone, the appearance of his book is an event of considerable importance. Scalia has long been traveling the country, making the argument on behalf of originalism and contending that there is no real alternative to it. Breyer demonstrates that on this point Scalia is wrong. Moreover, he does so in a way that is unfailingly civil and generous to those who disagree with him--and thus provides a model for how respectful argument might occur, even on a bench that has become polarized by unusually hot rhetoric.
Breyer's specific arguments make a great deal of sense. In the domain of personal privacy, for example, the Court should indeed be aware of how little it knows about current technological developments, and narrow rulings have the valuable feature of avoiding premature solutions. In general, Breyer makes a reasonable plea for judicial restraint, and it is illuminating to hear that plea from one of the Court's "liberals." But one of his largest claims is more general still: that any approach to legal interpretation must be defended in a way that plays close attention to its consequences. Despite its simplicity, this point is widely ignored.
It is hardly enough for originalists to defend their approach in strictly historical terms. Even if those who ratified the Constitution meant to hold us to their specific views--itself a much-disputed claim--it is up to us, and not to them, to decide whether to follow those views. The question of whether originalism is a sensible approach to constitutional law cannot be answered without reference to its consequences--and its consequences do indeed seem to make originalism unacceptable, because they would threaten so many contemporary rights and understandings. Just for starters, originalism would permit the national government to discriminate on the basis of both race and sex; it would allow state governments to discriminate on the basis of sex; and it would probably allow state governments to segregate people on the basis of race. (Rehnquist's refusal to endorse originalism may plausibly be attributed to the fact that it would produce unacceptable consequences; he was something of a pragmatist.)
For all these reasons, I believe that Breyer's approach is theoretically appealing as well as historically significant; but he offers a sketch, not a sustained argument, and he leaves significant gaps. Above all, he says too little about the difficulties that judges face in assessing consequences and in describing purposes. Recall that, in discussing the interpretation of statutes, Breyer argues for close attention to purposes, understood as the objectives of a "reasonable legislator." It should be obvious that different judges will often disagree about what a reasonable legislator would do. Imagine a law that condemns "discrimination on the basis of sex," and suppose that a state adopts a height and weight requirement for police officers, one that excludes far more women than men. In deciding whether this requirement is "discrimination," how shall judges characterize the purpose of a reasonable legislator? It is inevitable that courts will see their own preferred view as reasonable. Does this promote active liberty? And the problem is pervasive: laws rarely come with clear announcements of their purposes.
The textualist Scalia ridicules the resort to purposes, which, in his view, are often made up by willful judges. He believes that an emphasis on text, which is what after all has been enacted, promotes democratic responsibility, and also helps to discipline the judiciary. Textualism itself might easily be defended with reference to the principle of active liberty. Perhaps Scalia overstates the constraints imposed by text, but Breyer underplays the risk that any judgments about "reasonableness" will be the judges' own, in a way that disserves democracy itself. We may agree that any theory of interpretation has to be defended in terms of its consequences; but for interpreting statutes it is not at all clear that a purpose-based approach, focusing on consequences in particular cases, is preferable to a text-based approach, which asks judges to think little or not at all about consequences. Textualism might well lead to better results, all things considered. None of this means that Scalia's approach is necessarily superior to Breyer's. It means only that Breyer has not adequately engaged the possibility that, on his own consequentialist grounds, and with an eye on democratic goals, textualism in the interpretation of ordinary statutes might be better than an approach that explores purposes.
In fact, this problem pervades Breyer's general thesis about active liberty. To say the least, his investigation of constitutional history is sketchy, and he slides quickly over intense academic debates about what the American Framers actually sought to do. Breyer is not wrong to say that the Framers wanted to recognize both active liberty and negative liberty. Yet the Framers saw themselves as republicans, not as democrats, and they did not believe in participatory democracy, or in rule through town meetings. Of course they attempted to provide a framework for a form of self-government--but so stated, that goal operates at an exceedingly high level of abstraction, which does not easily permit interpreters to bring it to bear on concrete cases. Most of the time, we cannot easily link the general idea of self-government to particular judgments about contemporary disputes in constitutional law.
Certainly Breyer does not try to argue, in originalist fashion, that the actual drafters and ratifiers of the Constitution wanted to allow campaign finance reform, restrictions on advertising, affirmative action programs, and federal commandeering of state government. He argues instead that the idea of active liberty, which animates the Constitution, helps to justify these judgments. But exactly what kind of argument is that? The Framers of the Constitution also placed a high premium on "domestic tranquility," to which the preamble explicitly refers. Would it be right to say that because domestic tranquility is a central goal of the document, the president is permitted to ban dangerous speech? Or that, if affirmative action threatens to divide the races in a way that compromises "tranquility," color-blindness is the right principle after all? In any event, Breyer emphasizes that the Constitution attempts to protect negative liberty, too. Why shouldn't a ban on campaign finance restrictions be seen to follow from that goal? If the answer lies in the idea of active liberty, why shouldn't we see campaign finance restrictions as offending, at once, both forms of liberty?
Or suppose that we accept, as we should, Breyer's claims about the centrality of active liberty to the constitutional design. Is originalism, therefore, off the table? Not at all. We might believe, with some constitutional theorists (including Alexander Hamilton), that constitutional provisions, as products of an engaged citizenry, reflect the will of We the People, as ordinary legislation may not. If so, an emphasis on the original understanding can be taken to serve active liberty at the same time that it promotes negative liberty. It serves active liberty because it follows the specific judgments of an engaged citizenry. It promotes negative liberty to the extent that those judgments favor negative liberty. I do not mean to suggest that such an argument is convincing; the fact that the Framers and the ratifiers are long dead creates grave difficulties for those who argue for originalism in democracy's name. My point is that Breyer's emphasis on active liberty is pitched at too high a level of generality to rule originalism out of bounds.
Or return to Thayer's claim that the Court should strike down legislation only if it clearly violates the Constitution. Despite his general enthusiasm for restraint, Breyer does not mean to follow Thayer. But why not? Thayer and his followers can claim to favor active liberty, because they allow sovereign people to do as they choose. Perhaps Breyer thinks that this approach undervalues negative liberty. But why? Maybe a deferential Court will ultimately produce exactly the right mix of the two kinds of freedom. Ely's approach, emphasizing reinforcement of democratic processes, can easily be rooted in active liberty. Breyer writes approvingly of the Warren Court on the ground that its decisions promoted active liberty; and Ely is the Warren Court's most systematic defender. Does Breyer mean to endorse Ely? If not, where does he differ from him? It is puzzling that Breyer's book lacks even a single reference to Ely's well-known argument. (Breyer is rather ungenerous to other theorists who have toiled in the same vineyard, above all to Frank Michelman, who has been making claims about "active liberty" for over two decades.)
Recall that Breyer does not claim that legislative "purpose" is always something that can simply be found. "Purpose" is sometimes what judges attribute to the legislature, based on their own conception of what reasonable legislators would mean to do. If this is true for the purposes of individual statutes, it is also true for the purposes of the Constitution as well. When Breyer asserts that the "basic" purpose of the Constitution is to protect active liberty, so as to produce concrete conclusions on disputed questions, his own judgments about the goals of a reasonable constitution-maker are playing a central role in his assertion. Fortunately, Breyer's own judgments are reasonable; but he underplays the extent to which they are his own.
The same point bears on Breyer's enthusiasm for an inquiry into consequences. Consequences do matter; but some of the time it is impossible to assess consequences without reference to disputed questions of value. Consider the question of affirmative action, and suppose, rightly, that the text of the Constitution could be understood, but need not be understood, to require color-blindness. If we care about consequences, will we accept the color-blindness principle or not? Suppose we believe that affirmative action programs create racial divisiveness and increase the risk that underqualified people will be placed in important positions. If those are bad consequences, perhaps we will oppose affirmative action programs. An emphasis on consequences as such is only a start. To be sure, Breyer is not concerned with consequences alone; he wants to understand them with close reference to purposes, above all "active liberty." But as I have suggested, that idea, taken in the abstract, is compatible with a range of different approaches to constitutional law. It does not mandate Breyer's own approach.
None of this means that Breyer is wrong. On the contrary, I believe that he is largely right. He is right to say that the free speech principle should be understood in democratic terms. He is right to say that where the Court lacks important information, it should rule cautiously and narrowly. He is right to resist the constitutional assault on affirmative action programs (an assault that, by the way, is extremely hard to defend in originalist terms). He is right to reject originalism. Above all, he is right to emphasize the importance of democratic goals to constitutional interpretation. The problem is that he underplays the inevitable role of judicial judgments in characterizing purposes and in assessing consequences. But no approach to interpretation can avoid the interpreter's own judgments. A fuller account than Breyer has given here would specify the underlying judgments and attempt to defend them in far more detail. Such an account would have to show that courts are both willing and able to proceed as Breyer suggests; and it would also have to show that as compared with alternative possibilities, a democracy-centered approach of his preferred sort really would promote self-government, properly understood.
Active Liberty is a sketch, not a fully developed argument. But even sketches can change the way we look at things. With its modesty, its self-conscious pragmatism, and its emphasis on the centrality of democratic goals, Stephen Breyer's approach provides an eminently reasonable foundation for constitutional law. It is an approach that deserves a place of honor in national debates, now and in the future, about the role of the Supreme Court in American life.
VAWA funds family breakups
Washington Times, The (DC)
September 25, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
In 1994, the Justice Department, American Medical Association, Men's Health Network and other interested organizations co-sponsored the National Conference on Family Violence: Health and Justice, to address that disturbing issue.
The resulting legislation was the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). While appearing to fight for a noble cause, the law does little to actually remedy domestic violence and does not address several original conference goals: It is not gender-inclusive, allocates funds under a flawed grant system, and ultimately promotes family breakup, not reconciliation. The legislation currently before both chambers of Congress purports to address the gender issue but offers ineffective or counterproductive language. For example, its gender bias can be seen in programs that will provide services for "disabled women and girls," while providing no funding for programs to provide services for disabled boys or disabled men.
Research has shown that domestic violence is equally perpetrated by husbands and wives and affects all family members, something the legislation fails to address. No programs and services are allocated to other family members who may fall victim to domestic violence when the wife is abusive.
There are no programs that would teach women how to deal with family disputes without resorting to violence. The Texas VAWA grant application is quite clear on this: "Grant funds may not be used for the following: Services for programs that focus on children and/or men."
VAWA comes with a $4 billion price tag and a convoluted grant system. Grants are controlled by domestic violence coalitions made up of the same organizations, or their sister organizations, which receive the grants and erect barriers to new, outside applicants.
The family counseling and family preservation programs of faith-based organizations, often those most trusted by communities, should be a major part of VAWA initiatives, with the goal of preserving families, not destroying them. Unfortunately, programs offered by those organizations rarely get past the ideologically driven gatekeepers who control access to the funding. While new and innovative programs might be designed to address VAWA related family problems, those programs almost certainly will not qualify for funding due to grant guidelines that require a "documented history of effective work" (in the Senate bill) or a partnership with an existing granted entity (in the House bill).
In essence, VAWA has created a $4 billion domestic violence industry, which seeks to break families apart rather than work to solve families' problems.
Procedures of VAWA-funded organizations and incentives provided to local law enforcement destroy rather than preserve families. This is done by removing a parent (usually the father) from the home when there is a family dispute, and requiring that he pay for a therapy program even if he did not originate the dispute. This is the standard approach rather than working with the family to help them solve their disputes, save their marriage and provide their children a safe environment.
Further, current VAWA policies too often leave the children with the parent who initiated the violence, perhaps contributing to the fact that two-thirds of confirmed parent child abuse is committed by the mother, not the father.
The solution to the domestic violence epidemic is simply not found in VAWA. Before VAWA can be considered to be an effective tool to fight domestic violence, it must be extensively modified. Upon reauthorization, it must be made gender inclusive so funds are available for programs that provide services to female victims, male victims and elderly victims of domestic violence.
With $4 billion, VAWA supporters cannot cite poor funding as an excuse not to include both sexes and all ages. Faith-based and men's organizations must be included and encouraged to apply for funds under a fair grant system.
Above all, lawmakers should take a new approach to solving the problem - stressing family preservation, not destruction. While recognizing in some cases families members should be estranged from one another, we need to work to make it the last resort, not the first.
MELISSA WILT, Director of public policy Men's Health Network
U.S. Senate Passes Federal Legislation to Reauthorize Violence Against Women Act
Sun Advocate (Price, UT)
October 13, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
Last week, the United States Senate unanimously passed federal legislation that reauthorizes the 1994 Violence Against Women Act.
Sponsored by Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, the 1994 federal statute has played a vital role in protecting women from the tragedy of violence and abuse.
"I consider passing VAWA to be one of my greatest achievements as a Utah senator," commented Hatch. "This law directly addresses violence against women and is strengthening our families, our communities, and our nation."
The original act and subsequent legislation created new criminal penalties for federal interstate domestic violence, stalking and firearms crimes, explained the Utah senator.
In addition, the statute strengthened federal penalties for repeat sex offenders and required states and territories to enforce protection orders issued by other states.
The act is scheduled to expire in 2005 and the legislation passed by the U.S. Senate, S-1197, would reauthorize and expand the targeted programs for five additional years.
"The problem of violence against women does not always get the attention it deserves," pointed out Hatch. "But VAWA has contributed to decreasing violent crimes against women by 49 percent since 1992"
"Incidents of rape are down 60 percent and attempted rape is down by 57 percent over the same period. And importantly, more women are reporting domestic violence and receiving the necessary legal, financial, and social support they need for protection," continued the Utah senator.
The 1994 law also created the U.S. Office on Violence Against Women.
Currently directed by Diane Stuart of Utah, the office coordinates the federal funds that support rape prevention education, domestic violence intervention programs, battered women's shelters and law enforcement and prosecution services.
Since the federal statute's enactment in 1994, VAWA has provided more than $1.6 billion in grants to help states and local governments train personnel as well as establish domestic violence and sexual assault units that assist victims of violence, noted Hatch.
The 1994 Violence Against Women Act also authorized the legal assistance for victims program.
The federal LAV program has helped Utah Legal Services to provide counsel and advice to 1,226 victims and represent 410 victims in court actions since 2003.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed similar legislation, HR-3402, at the end of September.
A conference committee is scheduled to meet and negotiate a compromise bill that will be considered by U.S. Congress, concluded the Utah senator.
Deal reached on reauthorizing Violence Against Women Act
Associated Press Archive
December 16, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
The Senate Friday approved an extension of the Violence Against Women Act that calls for increased funding for the landmark act.
The House is expected to pass the legislation Saturday, according to the office of Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican who chairs the House Judiciary Committee.
The Violence Against Women Act, which is aimed at curtailing domestic violence through funding for women's shelters and law-enforcement training, expired in September. It originally passed Congress in 1994 and was renewed again in 2000. The latest renewal, approved on a voice vote by the Senate, calls for extending the legislation for five years, at a cost of about $3.9 billion.
The extension includes new provisions focused on health care, early intervention and outreach to American Indian women, among other areas.
"Putting an end to sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence and stalking will require a strong, steady commitment from the federal government," said Rep. Mark Green, the Wisconsin Republican who sponsored the renewal. "Over the last 10 years we've made historic progress in that effort, but the fight is far from over."
The original legislation was championed by Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., and his wife, Sheila Wellstone, who were killed in a plane crash three years ago. The Wellstones' son, Mark Wellstone, has lobbied Congress this year to renew the act.
"We're really happy that House and Senate members came together on a new Violence Against Women Act that emphasizes prevention," said Julie Koob, director of the Sheila Wellstone Institute, an anti-domestic violence group which helped lobby for the extension.
The $3.9 billion called for in the new bill represents a 20 percent increase over the last five-year extension, although the actual funding levels will be left to yearly appropriations legislation.
House Oks Violence Against Women Extension
Associated Press News Service, The
December 17, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
WASHINGTON (AP) - Congress on Saturday sent President Bush an extension of the Violence Against Women Act that would increase funding for the landmark act.
''This legislation will go far in providing protection for these women and their families,'' said Rep. Hilda Solis, D-Calif.
The House passed the bill on a voice vote Saturday, a day after the Senate approved it. ''Sometimes we do get something done around here and do get something done that's good and something that everybody agrees on,'' said Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
The Violence Against Women Act, which is aimed at curtailing domestic violence through funding for women's shelters and law-enforcement training, expired in September.
It originally passed Congress in 1994 and was renewed again in 2000. The latest renewal, also approved on a voice vote by the Senate, calls for extending the legislation for five years, at a cost of about $3.9 billion.
The extension includes new provisions focused on health care, early intervention and outreach to American Indian women, among other areas.
The $3.9 billion figure represents a 20 percent increase over the last five-year extension, although actual funding levels will be left to yearly appropriations legislation.
''This is a giant step forward, and offers real hope that our nation will significantly improve its response to domestic, sexual and dating violence and stalking,'' said Esta Soler, president of the Family Violence Prevention Fund.
___
The bill number is H.R. 3402.
Congress sends Bush extension to the Violence Against Women Act
Associated Press Archive
December 17, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
Congress on Saturday sent President Bush an extension of the Violence Against Women Act that would increase funding for the landmark act.
"This legislation will go far in providing protection for these women and their families," said Rep. Hilda Solis, D-Calif.
The House passed the bill on a voice vote Saturday, a day after the Senate approved it. "Sometimes we do get something done around here and do get something done that's good and something that everybody agrees on," said Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
The Violence Against Women Act, which is aimed at curtailing domestic violence through funding for women's shelters and law-enforcement training, expired in September.
It originally passed Congress in 1994 and was renewed again in 2000. The latest renewal, also approved on a voice vote by the Senate, calls for extending the legislation for five years, at a cost of about $3.9 billion.
The extension includes new provisions focused on health care, early intervention and outreach to American Indian women, among other areas.
The $3.9 billion figure represents a 20 percent increase over the last five-year extension, although actual funding levels will be left to yearly appropriations legislation.
"This is a giant step forward, and offers real hope that our nation will significantly improve its response to domestic, sexual and dating violence and stalking," said Esta Soler, president of the Family Violence Prevention Fund.
------
The bill number is H.R. 3402.
ANTI-DOMESTIC VIOLENCE ACT TO BE RENEWED, FUNDING HIKED
EXTENSION WILL ALSO HAVE FUNDING INCREASE
Capital Times, The (Madison, WI)
December 17, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner said Friday lawmakers struck a deal to renew the Violence Against Women Act and increase funding for the landmark legislation.
Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican who leads the House Judiciary Committee, said Congress is expected to pass the renewal as part of a bill governing Justice Department operations.
The Violence Against Women Act, which is aimed at curtailing domestic violence through funding for women's shelters and law enforcement training, originally passed Congress in 1994 and was renewed again in 2000. The latest renewal calls for extending the legislation for five years, at a cost of about $3.9 billion.
The extension includes new provisions focused on health care, early intervention and outreach to American Indian women, among others.
"Putting an end to sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence and stalking will require a strong, steady commitment from the federal government," said Rep. Mark Green, the Wisconsin Republican who sponsored the renewal. "Over the last 10 years we've made historic progress in that effort, but the fight is far from over."
The original legislation was championed by Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., and his wife, Sheila Wellstone, who were killed in a plane crash three years ago. Their son, Mark, has lobbied Congress this year to renew the act, which expired in September.
"We're really happy that House and Senate members came together on a new Violence Against Women Act that emphasizes prevention," said Julie Koob, director of the Sheila Wellstone Institute, an anti-domestic violence group that helped lobby for the extension.
The $3.9 billion called for in the new bill represents a 20 percent increase over the last five-year extension, although the actual funding levels will be left to yearly appropriations legislation.
Congress passes Crystal Judson bill to help stop abuse
The House and the Senate pass a bill that includes a provision in the name of Crystal Judson to fund domestic violence programs
News Tribune, The (Tacoma, WA)
December 19, 2005
https://infoweb.newsbank.com/
They were told it could take five years or more for Congress to take notice.
But over the weekend, the family of Crystal Judson Brame celebrated a victory for abused women across the United States, her father, Lane Judson, said Sunday.
Crystal was fatally shot by her husband, Tacoma Police Chief David Brame, in 2003. Brame then took his own life.
Now, Congress has approved a bill with a provision that will allow local and state law enforcement agencies to apply for more than $200 million in federal money per fiscal year to fund domestic violence programs.
The "Crystal Judson Domestic Violence Protocol Program" aims to train local victim advocates, ensure a more consistent response to domestic violence in law enforcement agencies and provide Department of Justice oversight.
"We just were so happy," said Lane Judson, 70, of Gig Harbor. "It was the best Christmas present you could ever get."
Judson said his family gathered around a television Saturday to watch the House action on C-SPAN. The group included the Brames' two children, Haley, 10, and David Jr., 8.
The children were nearby in April 2003 as their father shot their mother in a Gig Harbor parking lot, before he shot and killed himself.
The couple was in the middle of a divorce.
In court documents, Judson accused Brame of domestic violence.
"The kids watched (Saturday) and they were in awe in seeing their mama's name being brought up on the (House) floor," Lane Judson said. He said it reaffirms his belief that "an individual or a family in America really can make a difference."
The Judson provision that frees up domestic violence education and awareness funds for local and state law enforcement agencies was part of the Violence Against Women Act, which Congress reauthorized over the weekend. Before the action, it was unclear if the money was available to local law enforcement agencies, said U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Belfair).
"Law enforcement agencies should be setting an example, and there's a serious problem nationwide," Dicks said Sunday in a telephone interview. "Hopefully, these cities will have a program that will prevent someone from being abused."
Shortly before his daughter died May 3, 2003, Lane Judson held her hand and promised her he would not allow another woman to be abused or killed by her partner.
Two days after her funeral, Judson and his wife, Patty, started their 2 1/2-year campaign to persuade state and national lawmakers to get serious about domestic violence by providing more funding for education and awareness.
They lobbied Washington's congressional delegation, spoke and met with congressional aides, and eventually started a letter-writing campaign that targeted Democratic Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, Rep. Dave Reichert (R-Bellevue) and Dicks.
Since September, about 8,000 people signed letters that the Judsons sent to the officials' offices, urging them to make domestic violence a priority in Congress.
Judson said his family was "elated" and "couldn't believe it" when an aide from Democratic Rep. Jay Inslee's office called Friday to say the bill probably would pass during the weekend.
"We're just so happy," Patty Judson said. "If we can save one life, that means a lot to us. We just want to help the women out there that are being abused as we speak."
