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2002 Crime Victim Service Award Recipients Aid for Victims of Crime, Inc. When established in 1972, Aid for Victims of Crime, Inc., was the first full-scale victim assistance program in the United States. A volunteer-centered enterprise from its inception, Aid for Victims of Crime relies heavily on the help of community members in reaching out to victims in the highest crime areas of St. Louis, Missouri. Seeing that victims of some of the most violent crimes had nowhere to turn for help, founder Carol Vittert set up shop in her home, copied the bylaws of the Sickle Cell Anemia Foundation, and began looking for donations from friends and local corporations. Her efforts led to an organization whose 70 volunteers now serve thousands of victims in a three-county area in Missouri, providing counseling, crisis response, court advocacy, a 24-hour hotline, and training and technical assistance for allied professionals and volunteer groups. Recognized as leaders in both state and national victim advocacy efforts, staff members contributed heavily to the establishment of the Missouri Victim Assistance Network, which led the push for a state victims' rights constitutional amendment, and were called to testify before Ronald Reagan's Task Force on Victims of Crime. In 1993, Aid for Victims of Crime formed the state's first crisis response team, which has since responded to three dozen communities and has lent its expertise to crisis response efforts in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The victim assistance field's maiden program celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, an event that will be recognized during National Crime Victims' Rights Week activities across the country. David and Ann Scoville On October 21, 1991, Patricia Ann Scoville was raped, murdered, and buried in a shallow grave near Moss Glen Falls in Stowe, Vermont. The crime remains unsolved to this day. Patricia's parents, David and Ann, began advocating for the establishment of state and national DNA databases and databanks, working closely with Parents of Murdered Children and other victim support groups. Their lobbying efforts led first to the establishment of DNA databases in Vermont and Rhode Island and then to passage of the Federal DNA Identification Act. Through media outreach and numerous speaking engagements, Mr. and Mrs. Scoville now work to strengthen state and national databases and to call attention to enhancing the collection of forensic evidence. They reached out to the citizens of the community in which Patricia Ann was murdered, undertaking the beautification of the site where her body was found as a memorial to their daughter. In marking the fifth and tenth anniversaries of her death at the memorial site, the Scovilles spoke about the importance of DNA evidence as they have continued to do at gatherings in Vermont and across the Nation. Chaplain Mindi Russell Chaplain Mindi Russell has been providing chaplaincy services to victims since 1993. In her role as executive director of and senior chaplain for the Law Enforcement Chaplaincy Sacramento, Chaplain Russell supervises a team of nearly 75 volunteer chaplains who work around the clock with 14 police departments, city and county government agencies, corporations, businesses, schools, individuals, and families. Through her affiliation with the National Transportation Safety Board, Chaplain Russell provided services to victims of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, instructing more than 500 chaplains from across the country on mass disaster care. The Red Cross assigned her the task of validating the credentials of each chaplain, and she spent 2 weeks at Ground Zero working with first responders and the families of victims. Chaplain Russell also reaches out to those who provide care in times of crisis, offering debriefing intervention for chaplains and service providers. Her leadership has earned her a role as senior chaplain on the Peace Officer Standards Training Advisory Board, which is developing the standardized training criteria for all California law enforcement chaplains. Under her direction, Sacramento has become a training center for law enforcement and community chaplains in her region and a model for the Nation. Carolyn Clayton Carolyn Clayton was driven into victim advocacy by the murder of her daughter Amy, who was raped and stabbed to death while jogging in July 1986. Angered by the attention paid to the rights of the offender while her own were ignored and frustrated by the lack of support services available in her own state, Carolyn Clayton joined forces with other survivors to form Mississippi Advocates for Crime Victims. After helping to win legislative victories for victims, the group went on to obtain not-for-profit status as Survival, Inc. As executive director of Survival, Ms. Clayton oversees an array of services for victims of violent crime, including crisis intervention, court advocacy, in-home visits, and group support. Survival now provides services to victims in 23 counties in Mississippi. 2002 Susan Laurence Memorial Award for Professional Innovation in Victim Services Recipient Washington State's Address Confidentiality Program Initiated in 1991 and the first of its kind in the Nation, the Address Confidentiality Program was designed to ensure that victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking cannot be tracked through the state's public records. The program works by serving as the victim's legal agent for receipt of mail, providing a substitute address on government-related documents. Free of charge and secure, it allows victims to retain confidentiality while relieving government agencies of the difficult and costly task of maintaining confidential records. One component of the program has set up special voter registration and marriage licensing procedures that prevent public access through those records. The program now provides services to underserved populations, including tribal members, deaf and hard-of-hearing victims, and Spanish-speaking victims. Now that similar programs have been instituted in other states, Washington's is frequently called upon to provide technical assistance, bill drafting suggestions, budget planning, and other guidance. It is currently undertaking an effort to draft legislation that would require Federal Government agencies to accept such a program. 2002 Crime Victims Fund Award Recipients Financial Litigation Unit The Financial Litigation Unit (FLU) for the District of Puerto Rico has used existing procedures and laws and has developed new procedures to promote awareness of the objectives of the Crime Victims Fund (the Fund). In cases in which the supervised release term was about to expire and defendants alleged no ability to pay, FLU coordinated with the court and the U.S. Probation Office to revise procedures so that payment of restitution would not be a condition of supervised release. As a result, defendants continue to be liable for payment of their debt and FLU can continue with collection enforcement. In cases in which the defendant posted bail, FLU was able to request that the court forfeit the bail money and credit it toward satisfaction of the criminal imposition, thus promoting awareness of the Fund. In other cases in which there were not real properties from which to collect, the FLU team conferred with Property Registries and collected against the defendant's surety, resulting in payments toward the Fund. In addition, FLU revisited the Debt Collection Act, which provides various civil procedures for collecting debts owed to the Federal Government. The FLU team prepared pleadings for a "voluntary" garnishment as a procedure to collect in criminal cases, which eliminates the need for the U.S. Marshals Service to effect the collections, thereby making it a faster and more cost-efficient method than regular garnishment. The same technique is now being used successfully to collect civil judgments as well. United States v. Peggy Rurup Team, U.S. Attorney's Office The combined efforts of the U.S. Attorney's Office and the District Court of the Northern District of Iowa have resulted in a new policy that allows victim restitution to be paid directly into the Crime Victims Fund. The new policy was used most effectively in United States v. Peggy Rurup, a fraud case that involved multiple victims. Together, the group devised a form and policy that outlined the provisions of the Mandatory Victims Restitution Act. Before sentencing, an informational sheet and form were provided to victims that they could return to the U.S. Attorney's Office with directions for payment of their restitution. All Assistant U.S. Attorneys, victim/witness coordinators, and Financial Litigation Units in the district have been trained on the new policy, and it has proven effective in reducing the time needed to locate victims and the number and amount of checks issued by the clerk of the court. This new proactive approach was presented as a model at the OVC 2001 National Symposium on Victims of Federal Crime and has since been adopted by districts outside of Iowa. When considering the cumulative impact of the funds added to the Crime Victims Fund, the expenses saved by the government, and the number of districts that have or could implement the new procedure, the results are significant. 2002 Federal Service Award Recipient Lynne Ward Crout Over the past 3 years, the area under the jurisdiction of the Western District of North Carolina has been the scene of three sensational murder cases, one involving a park ranger who was ambushed and shot on the Blue Ridge Parkway, a second involving the robbery and thrill killing of a young couple camping in the Pisgah National Forest, and the third involving a track star and honor student who was raped, tortured, and murdered in Pisgah. Lynne Crout's efforts to reach out to the victims in these three capital cases have resulted in friendships with families of each of the victims and have demonstrated the enormous and emotionally wrenching commitment Ms. Crout has made to these victims and witnesses. In addition, her efforts have helped to develop new laws in this circuit regarding the garnishment of tribal funds for restitution to victims. As a direct result of her efforts, the standard procedure for the U.S. Probation Office is to include in presentence information the entitlement to tribal funds to allow the court to include garnishment language in the judgment. |
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