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 It Would Be Dead Wrong To Take Money Earmarked For Crime Victims And Fatten The State's General Fund. By Jeff Smith PICTURE THIS: YOU'RE a UA student stuck home on Friday night without a date. Rather than drown your sorrows in a case of Coors you do the mature thing and crack that psych text you've been avoiding, and study for your midterm. About half past midnight you realize you're hungry, so you hike down to the Circle K for some Twinkies and a YooHoo. On the way out, this street person asks you for your spare change. You tell him you're sorry but all your cash is tied up in these Twinkies and this bottle of chocolate soda. You'd rather not share your jug with a guy with green teeth, but you offer him a Twinkie. He refuses, angrily, and pulls out a knife and sticks it between your fourth and fifth left ribs.
Trick question: You feel nothing. You're dead. Your family, however, feels horrible about this, in more strange and disorienting ways than they ever imagined they would feel, from causes no one in his right mind would expect to be sources of grief, and for longer than human endurance might be expected to support. Like forever. Welcome to the world of Homicide Survivors. Have a nice day. A couple of weeks ago I introduced you to a woman who was herself welcomed to this world back in 1993 when she stumbled across the body of a murdered girl, while out walking her dog in a dry riverbed. The shock of that little surprise kept her awake many a night--or wishing she had stayed awake rather than endure the nightmares--and ultimately led her into friendship with the mother and friends of the victim. Norah Booth's story of that murder mystery, its prelude and aftermath, and her peripheral part in the play is this issue's cover story and a hell of a good read. If you haven't already, check it out. After you finish this. This is about how the murdered girl's survivors and others like them are being further victimized, screwed over and literally (not figuratively) robbed by our august Arizona Legislature. I capitalized Homicide Survivors two graphs previous because it's the name of an organization, not simply a descriptive phrase. It used to be called Parents of Murdered Children, Inc., but the group soon realized the victimization spiral doesn't stop with the person who gets the knife in the ribs, or his immediate family, but can take in many more unintended targets. Now I realize we live in an age when everybody with a whine and an appetite for the easy score claims to be victimized by someone with deep pockets, but in the instance of homicide survivors we're talking the real deal. Somebody in your family gets murdered and suddenly you're sucked into a hellish maelstrom of police, lawyers, shrinks and ruinous expense. If your home is the crime scene, you can expect the place to be further trashed by the investigators and then left, like a war zone. For you to clean up. And pay for. In 1990 a group of Arizonans brought this to the public's attention and circulated petitions, got a referendum on the ballot and passed it. You may remember it as Proposition 104, the Victims' Bill of Rights. It was approved by the Legislature and a mechanism was established whereby the criminals were levied fines and fees to help pay some of the costs of their acts, like funeral expenses and counseling for survivors of murder victims. Gail Leland was ready to put some of that money to good use. Her son was murdered in Tucson 18 years ago. The murderer was never caught and Gail never got a dime's worth of help from the public. Such programs simply didn't exist back then. But Gail is a worker bee, and since the Victims' Bill of Rights became law, she has worked, in space donated by the Pima County Attorney's Office, to help families of victims. Up till now, however, her volunteer office has been getting only about 10 grand a year from the state. Not much to spread around the survivors of the county's 90 or so murder victims each year. Why so little? Gail says that collection of the fines and fees simply wasn't aggressively pursued until just recently. Odd, in a state that rather prides itself on being tough on crime. Odd, in a state full of politicians who love to be known as tax cutters, and ought to just love collecting money from criminals in order to repay their victims. But now the money has begun rolling in and the program is getting attention. Attention from the mighty and powerful. Like state Sen. Darden Hamilton. He's a Republican from Glendale and chairman of the Joint Appropriations Committee on Criminal Justice. Among the matters currently under consideration by Hamilton's committee is this sudden windfall coming out of the state's jails and prisons, something on the order of $550,000 anticipated this coming fiscal year, and $750,000 the year following. What Hamilton and his committee have recommended doing with the money is 'sweeping' it into the state general fund, where it can be counted as part of an overall budgetary surplus and used to justify a tax cut. Tax cuts tend to make politicians beloved by the little people. Ergo, re-elected. But this is one tax-cutting scam that will not sit well with some of the little people. It won't go down well with those little people who've already been victimized by sociopathic murderers, and then, incidentally or otherwise, by a sometimes uncaring legal profession and judicial system. Plus it isn't even legal. Prop 104 was the old initiative and referendum system in action, a constitutionally adopted mechanism for direct democracy. The people demanded action and they got it. And part of that action was a funding apparatus that levied fines and fees against the criminals to directly reimburse their victims and survivors of victims for specified expenses. This $550,000 to $750,000 is not some nest egg of tax dollars, imposed by the Legislature and collected at its direction, to be squirreled away or siphoned off for legislative or political purposes. These funds are independently collected and specifically earmarked. Hamilton, and everyone else in his committee, and throughout the Legislature, had best keep their grubby hands off that money, or pay the legal and political price:
Which is death! Followed by castration. Give me a while and I'll
think of something else.
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