How the Right Hijacked the Feminist/Victim's Rights Movement

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These quotes are from the book Politics and Plea Bargaining: Victims' Rights in California
by Candace McCoy; University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993

Criminal justice policies fit on a continuum between the two values of due process and crime control. Under certain conditions, there are more activities demonstrating due process; under other conditions, there are more crime control actions. Nobody seriously proposes abolishing either, but advocates mold political debate and action so as to push the pendulum in one direction or the other. This book describes the development of conditions that pushed the pendulum away from due process.

Those conditions include manipulation of public opinion by a dedicated group of law and order conservatives. Recognizing a powerful image -- the victim of crime, doubly victimized first by the criminal and then by the criminal justice system -- they claimed the image as their own and offered it as the antithesis to due process, which they defined as "defendants' rights." They used the unfortunate and emotionally laden plight of crime victims to justify their campaign to pass legislation overturning due-process-oriented caselaw and to institute court procedures which offered little opportunity for evidentiary challenge. "Thus although the call for victims' rights has been described as a populist movement reacting to perceived or real injustices in the processing of cases, in reality the victims' movement agenda has been co-opted by that of the supporters of the crime control model of criminal justice." 2

2. Emilio Viano, "Victim's Rights and the Constitution: Reflections on a Bicentennial", 33 CRIME & DELINQUENCY444 ( 1977). Viano notes that there is an important distinction between two wings of the victims' movement. The original widespread impetus to recognize the interests of victims in the criminal justice system came from the women's movement and first manifested itself in concern for rape victims. While these activists could be militant in demanding that court procedures change so as not to"revictimize," proposals for reform generally included compensation and restitution, social and psychological help, and more polite concern for victims and witnesses in preparing for court appearances. This essentially humanistic and social reformoriented movement contrasts sharply with the victims' movement as a vehicle for conservative ideology, which is the subject here.

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1. The Right's Fight

One of the most powerful books in favor of "victim's rights" was written by George P. Fletcher, With Justice for Some: Victims' Rights in Criminal Trials.

Who also wrote: Romantics at War : Glory and Guilt in the Age of Terrorism
by George P. Fletcher (Hardcover - September 16, 2002)


Review:
"George P. Fletcher is convinced that our liberalism — or, as he sometimes prefers, our "liberal individualism" — has left us ill-equipped for the task of understanding and waging effectively or justly the war on terrorism. Owing to what he regards as liberalism's impoverished moral and intellectual resources, our efforts to comprehend "American policies in the wake of September 11" and to elaborate a "jurisprudence of war" for a new age are beset by a "conceptual morass." Fletcher's aim is to rescue us from it. By showing the extent of our hitherto unacknowledged dependence on, and the untapped insights and inspiration we have yet to draw from, the Romantic tradition — the tradition of, among others, Blake and Wordsworth and Keats and Byron in England, and of Herder, the Schlegels, and Fichte in Germany — Fletcher aims to liberate us from our liberalism." Peter Berkowitz, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review)

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2. Only the downfall of liberalism

More from Politics and Plea Bargaining: Victims' Rights in California for the anti-conspiracy theorists:

Senator Richardson, a man of prodigious energy and dedication to law and order causes, has been described as "a doctrinaire conservative, once both a member of and fundraiser for the John Birch Society, a shrewd backroom operator... a passionate hunter and gun enthusiast." 11 Richardson won the Republican primary and ran for the U.S. Senate in 1974, but he was defeated by liberal Alan Cranston. He then withdrew from Sacramento politics and devoted his energy to developing a direct-mail publicity and fundraising organization to support politicians and causes agreeable to his conservative philosophy. His base of support had always been primarily rooted in law enforcement circles, but computerized campaigning allowed him to expand his influence by appealing to groups of people on mailing lists obtained from a variety of sources.

Richardson's computer mail organization grew when, in 1976, he linked it with the talents of Richard Viguerie. 12 Paul llGann also maintained close ties with the Richardson machine. Gann had successfully wedded computer mailing techniques to the initiative process in his highly publicized 1978 spearheading of Proposition 13, an initiative to roll back property taxes, which he had advocated in partnership with Howard Jarvis. 13 (Proposition 13 froze real estate taxes at their 1975 level, which drastically cut funds available for municipal services and public works. After its passage, about a dozen other states adopted similar measures.) In 1980, Richardson and Gann united to plan the passage of a "Victims' Bill of Rights" on the initiative ballot.

Several lawmakers and policy analysts aided Richardson and Gann. George Nicholson was the proposed law's ideological father and primary drafter. Formerly a senior trial attorney in the Alameda County District Attorney's office and later a senior Assistant Attorney General in the state justice department, Nicholson was a well-known supporter of hard-line anticrime policies. He served as Executive Director of the California District Attorneys Association in 1978, and he intended to run for state Attorney General in 1982. It is hardly coincidence that Proposition 8 was scheduled to appear on the same ballot with primary election candidates for state office. Also scheduled for the June 1982 ballot was a controversial gun control measure which, conservatives hoped, would draw many "tough on crime" voters to the polls. They would vote against gun control and continue down the ballot to vote for Proposition 8 and for its author.

Ordinarily, suggesting that such close connections existed between conservative politicians, their policy supporters, and planned electoral issue-mongering might strain credibility. But this group of dedicated anticrime entrepreneurs was well recognized in Sacramento and in newspapers and broadcasts as an organized coterie of agitators for the conservative agenda. The group also received sustained attention when some of its members later carried its ideas to the national arena. Included were State Senator Ed Davis and Edwin Meese III, who, like Nicholson, was formerly a Deputy District Attorney in Alameda County. Meese later headed a San Diego legal policy studies center and eventually was appointed Attorney General of the United States when Ronald Reagan became President. He provided a conduit whereby the law-and-order agenda developed in California in the 1960s and 1970s was later applied to national policies. These people were united in their demands that California criminal law be transformed, and, to a large extent, they cohered so tightly because of their common experience in attempting to recall the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court, Rose Bird, in 1978.

Those who research the wing-nut machine will recognize those names.