Supporting The Mission And Goals Of 2010 National Crime Victims' Rights Week

Floor Speech

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Mr. ROYCE. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

When we talk about the 5 million violent crimes that occur in this country every year, we should be mindful of what that means in terms of the shattered lives of the victims, those who survive and those who don't survive; their families are shattered by this experience.

I want to take a moment and recognize someone who did a lot in California to help change many of the laws in our State, and that is Colleen Thompson Campbell, who lost not only her son to violent crime, but also, in a separate case, lost her brother and sister-in-law to murder as well.

I have had the opportunity to work with Colleen over the years. She formed an organization called MOVE, Memories of Victims Everywhere. One of the concepts that she had was to try, in State law, to overturn some of the worst decisions made by the then Rose Bird Court, which we did with Proposition 115. I was the author of that legislation. We could not get that legislation to try to restore rights between the victims of crime and the accused through the State legislature, so she went out and pounded the pavement with victims' rights groups across the State. And after gaining 1 million signatures, on the third try we were able to pass it overwhelmingly in the State of California. But that proposition, the Crime Victims/Speedy Trial Initiative, gave victims the right to a speedy trial, it gave those victims an opportunity to testify, it increased sentences, it increased punishment, it required reciprocal discovery of evidence, tried to right that balance, it allowed the family members of those victims to stay in the courtroom and follow these proceedings and not be dismissed, and allowed them also to go to the sentencing. I testified before the House Constitution Subcommittee here some years later when we had an opportunity to mold legislation based on what we had done in California, the victims' rights bill that became law, codifying crime victims' rights here at the Federal level.

I would also just like to recognize another individual who was affected by crime, Kathleen Baty. She never even knew that the man stalking her really had existed when she was in high school and went to UCLA. She was running on campus, she was participating in sports. She did not know that this individual--who she had never met--had become obsessed with her and would take it upon himself over the next 10 years to follow her and stalk her relentlessly and threaten her and attempt to abduct her. It is phenomenal that it took legislation to actually prevent this crime of stalking, but that's where the concept came from, from this case and the case of four young women in my county of Orange County who all died within a span of 6 weeks. Everyone had gone to law enforcement and been told there is nothing we can do despite you being stalked until you are attacked physically. So we passed the Anti-Stalker law--with her testifying--at the State level, and later she came back here and helped us with the Federal law as well.

Why with the Federal law? Because the first thing we tell victims is to get away from your stalker. And when he gets out, or slips--as with the case of her stalker, he cut off his ankle bracelet after he was finally apprehended. By the way, he was apprehended on her doorstep after a 10-hour standoff with a knife to her throat, but he had not dragged her more than the required 1,000 feet, so it was not kidnapping.

This is why we needed the Anti-Stalker Act, why we passed it at the Federal level, why we have to be aware of the rights and the needs and the concerns of victims of crime because these are the types of laws that now we have been able to pass, as I say, in Japan and overseas as well, in Europe. But if we look at the effect on these lives--and I remember Kathleen Baty coming back here to tell me about how she was never able to shake this individual--now we have the Federal law so that if the victim crosses State lines, the perpetrator cannot cross those State lines to pursue them.

The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.

Mr. ROYCE. I will also mention the legislation that I authored in California to put fines on those who are convicted of crimes and fund programs in the State for victims, and we have done this at the Federal level as well.

We need to do more to right the scales of justice; we need to do more to balance the rights of crime victims; and lastly, what this particular resolution here today does, we need to do more to make the public aware of just how out of balance these scales are to the 5 million victims of crime every year in the United States.

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