You're Wrong About - The Victims’ Rights Movement

Episode Date: August 16, 2019

“When you allow emotion into the courtroom, bias rushes in alongside it.” Special guest Rachel Monroe tells Mike and Sarah how a good-faith critique of the justice system led to a decades-long crackdown. Digressions include Charles Manson, Ronald Reagan and a billionaire mugshot. Mike’s similes are worse than Sarah’s.Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

Everybody became victims in waiting. Totally. Sorry. Does she disagree with that? Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where the thing you thought... Wait, no. Okay. We practiced this!

We're getting there. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where you're drawn into a story for one reason, but stay there for another. Ooh, it's like Denny's. Yeah, because you're drawn in for the pancakes and you stay for the human condition. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. I'm Sarah Marshall.

I'm working on a book about the Satanic Panic. And we're on Patreon at patreon.com slash You're Wrong About. And we are here with our beloved guest and friend of the show, Rachel Monroe, today. Hi. It's your third time. Three Pete. It's like Alec Baldwin on SNL. You just come back every couple months.

I'm like Alec Baldwin in so many ways. And today we're talking about the victims' rights movement. Yes. I've been excited about this one because for HuffPost last year, I was covering all the ballot initiatives that passed during the election. And I remember seeing all these states, I think it was like 13 states passed quote, unquote, victims' rights laws. You could tell that something was amiss because they were all named after like young children,

right? They were all like Jessica's law. Yeah. It was like, oh, we're legislating by like tragedies now. By the way, Rachel has a book coming out this month. Everyone who likes to learn about crime and wants to strike up a conversation with me if you hang out in an airport should read it. It's called Savage Appetites.

And that's like, I feel like essentially the one of the theses of one of your chapters, which is like, no one can say no to Stevie's law. Yeah, totally. People keep asking me about my book as if it's about like, why are women obsessed with true crime? And it's kind of about that. But then what it came to be about was more about the aftermath of these crimes and these obsessions and like what political, cultural, social use is made of these crimes that become

personal and national obsessions. Yeah, there's one whole section is about the the aftermath of the Manson family murders and the way that they are entwined with the rise of the victims rights movement, which is itself like a totally fascinating and really important part of the way that our criminal justice system is the way that it is now. Yeah, because I remember reading around the election as part of the victims rights movement, a bunch of these ballot initiatives passed and I was like the what movement what like this was not something that I had any idea about.

This is one of those moments when I'm like, oh right, you weren't raised as a girl. Well, I know enough about the US legal system and ballot initiatives to know that like it sounds pretty bad, but I don't know like in what ways. Because any any description of any law or policy is probably the opposite. Like how the Clean Air Act was about enabling pollution. So the victims rights movement has to be about potentially spoiler projecting the desires of certain political actors on to people who are dead and can't argue. Yes, yeah.

Yes, originally what is what is the victims rights movement reacting to? Where did this all start? So you have in the 60s Supreme Court, the Warren Court, which starts issuing all these rulings that are protecting criminal defendants. So this is I mean, law and order would be a completely different show without the Warren Court, right? This is where we have the Miranda warnings. This is where we have the idea that you have, if you can't afford an attorney, you will get a court appointed one.

A big one is the idea that if evidence is obtained and then illegal search, you can't have that evidence presented at trial. I feel like they should have mentioned this in the opening of Dirty Dancing, and then we would be more likely to have learned it as a culture. So it's like the summer of 1963 can be like it was before Miranda rights, before the right to a court appointed attorney, when everyone still called me baby and it hadn't occurred to me to mind. I feel like it's amazing how we believe that what the legal landscape that we live in now has existed forever.

Totally. And also at the time, they seemed to some people like really radical and messed up. They're like, what do you mean the police can't just come in and illegally search your house and use that to criminally indict you. That seemed really offensive to certain people that you were somehow impeding the police's power or the idea that they would have to tell you that you had rights or something. They were like, what? We can't do that. What a terrible impediment. These things that seem really completely have been now completely normalized and baked in and feel really essential.

As someone who grew up watching Law & Order, I grew up knowing or feeling that I knew how to Miranda someone. I kind of feel like I could, right? At least the first three lines. Yeah, I mean, it's like the Pledge of Allegiance or something. It's one of these things that you've heard it repeated so many times that the literal meaning of the words disappears. It's like the Lord's Prayer. I know it as well as I know the Lord's Prayer. Right. But it's funny. It's like only the past 50, 60 years that we've had that. Right.

And one crucial thing that comes out of the victim's right movement is this idea that we're building towards, which is the idea that victims and criminal defendants, criminal offenders are these diametrically opposed camps. And if you give rights to one, you're taking away rights from the other. And they're engaged in this zero-sum game battle to the death. So as these rights are given to criminal defendants, the Republican Party starts to get upset, feel like this is troubling. But anyway, so at the same time as the Supreme Court is issuing these rulings, you also see the crime rate is starting to rise in the 60s. Do we know why the crime rate was rising during this time or is there like prevalent theory about it?

There was a Gallup poll and I believe they said that it was Negroes running wild and communists were like the top two responses. Oh my God. And like the top two beliefs at the time about why crime is rampant. Yeah. So it feels like things are changing, right? I mean, that's like the whole thing about the 60s. And then you have the Manson murders happen in August 1969. Which I know nothing about because I've been keeping myself spoiler free. And also you've been keeping yourself spoiler free for life because you have avoided all bloody or scary matter. So I'm just curious, like as someone who has experienced this mainly through cultural drift,

what's your idea of what the, who he was and what the Manson murders were? He's like the Elizabeth Holmes of murdering people. Because he never did any real work. Well, for years when people talked about the Manson murders, I always thought that he was a serial killer, right? Because his name comes before murders. Right. Because he's claiming women's work. Yes. So I really have avoided all these other podcasts and stories about him because I know that we're eventually going to do like a four hour long episode about him. Oh, you're so good.

But my like blank slate understanding is that he's like the leader of a group. I don't even know what their ideology was, but just that like went out and killed people on his behalf, I guess, but he never actually killed anyone. I don't even like, I don't even know if we can like begin to talk about this without then talking about it for four hours. But you have this like hippie counter cultural gang. They're living together. It's this like super patriarchal system where Charles Manson, who is this ex-con who's kind of ambivalent about the hippies. Sort of like more of like a fifties style bad boy. He seems like he was, yeah, like he was more like the Pied Piper of Tucson.

He was really into Scientology. He was really into like how to win friends and influence people like all of that. That's so embarrassing. So they were like a pretty messed up exploitative to women patriarchal scene when they were doing LSD and then they start to get more isolated, more paranoid and do more speed. And that culminates in this spree of murders. But maybe the more relevant thing to talk about is how after the murders happened, they were kind of metabolized by the media, which was this thing that you hear a lot. Like the Joan Didi online that gets repeated all the time, which is, I don't remember it verbatim, but that the Manson murders were the end of the 60s that we had had this period of openness and freedom. And the Beach Boys were hanging out with the Manson family who was hanging out.

It was like movie stars, rock stars, politicians, crazy hippies. Everybody was hanging out. Nobody locked their doors. Everybody was having sex with everybody. Everybody was doing drugs and like, no, that's dangerous. That has to stop. That ends with murder and bloodshed and we got to lock it down. So you have this reaction to the openness and permissiveness and drug culture and sex culture of the 60s.

That also reminds me of the way that I feel like I saw Altamont framed as I was growing up. And the moral of Altamont is like, the 60s were a nice idea, but like, nope. Time to strike the set and move on. We tried the 60s. We're over it. Yeah. And as a kid, I was like, why couldn't the 60s go on forever? And I felt like my parents' generation was like, you know, Altamont.

And it was like, no, that's like, you just wanted to stop trying. And you were like, well, the Rolling Stones fucked up. So it's all over. And then we all got jobs in finance. The crazy thing to me about the framing of, oh, it was the Manson murders that ended the 60s is like, wait, Richard Nixon had just gotten elected. You know, previous to this is like, maybe you could look at that. There was already like a reaction happening and a desire to like tamp down and formulate this idea of like, no, there's a silent majority that hates all of this. It's a way of giving Charlie too much credit.

Yeah, exactly. I don't know if this becomes relevant later, but I have a friend who wrote his PhD on the youth movements that helped get Nixon elected in 68. And his whole thing is that like, there were way more like young conservatives getting kind of radicalized at that time than there ever were hippies. But like the hippies that beat Knicks, this whole thing got a ton of media attention. But in reality, the 60s were actually a huge ramp up in conservative thought and conservative organizing. It just didn't get the same amount of attention. Right. Even if you have a president who is aligned with your political views, you still feel like you're losing and you have all that resentment and an energy of like, we're being locked out somehow, even as you have political control.

I'm sure that zero sum thinking is a flaw in human behavior. That's something that we do as a species. But do you think that there's a rise in zero sum political ideology at this time? These are like SAT questions. I love this. Listen, I'm living with my parents this summer. I've been watching a lot of PBS news hour. But so another strain that feeds into it, right, is that you have at the same time the rise of feminism.

And that's the thing that's really interesting. Which is also, I think, a big motivator of zero sum thought, right? Because like, oh my God, these women want rights. How will they get them? Only by destroying our situation. Right. I mean, the complicated thing always about talking about the victims' rights movement, it's this fusion of right-wing, tough-on-crime criminal justice, law and order policy, and feminist rhetoric, right?

So it's like, things that I like and things that I have trouble with get kind of fused together. Yeah. Right. It's like kimchi, mac and cheese. Two things that seem like they shouldn't go together but actually works really well. No. That is an inaccurate analogy. It's like if you had a lovely little puppy and then you gave him radioactive sludge to play in,

and then he became a puppy monster and destroyed Tokyo. I like yours better. So how does this all come together? So you have at this time, with some of the women's movement stuff that's happening, people are starting to make legislative and other reforms. So it's like, okay, what if we had a bill so that if you're a rape victim and you're trying to testify against your assailant, you don't have to be cross-examined about your sexual history.

A lot of it ends up being activism by women to reform law enforcement and the judicial system to be less traumatizing to sexual assault victims. What if police officers were trained to understand how people respond to sexual assault? What if we had rape crisis centers, places where women could go to be safe? What if you had a victims advocate, like somebody within law enforcement or somebody within the judicial system who was your point person if you were trying to navigate this overwhelming system by yourself? And so these things are coming out of the feminist movement.

I mean, I would say they are really positive and really important reforms. Yeah, those sound great. That's the puppy. Yeah. And in some ways, what starts the victims' rights movement is responding to a real interesting and strange lack in the way the American criminal justice system is, which is fundamentally based on English criminal justice, which is when you commit a crime, like if I hit Sarah,

my offense isn't really against Sarah, it's against in England, the king. It's like an offense against the king, the crown, right? Because I'm harming the social fabric or something in the United States. It's not the king, but it's the state. And so there isn't really a role in the criminal justice system in the proceedings for a victim. Like there's not space for you. Right.

Because they are evidence in the case of the state against the perpetrator. They're not the one driving the trial. Yeah, it's like Texas versus Rachel Monroe. Right. So that's the only role that you could have as a victim is potentially as evidence as a witness or something. If you're called as a witness, you get cross-examined. There's not really a role for you to say, like, this is what happened to me. This is the impact that it's had on me.

Right. It never occurred to me to think of it this way, but you know, the defense and the prosecution would be like, well, there's this like blood spatter evidence and like the defense can argue it this way and the prosecution can argue it this way and like how useful is it to each side and how can they fight over it and how can they invalidate it. And it's like, that's what you are as a person. Like that's bad. Right.

Yeah, it's an adversarial system. And so you become this thing that's kind of batted around or you just don't have a voice at all. You know, maybe you're not called to testify. And then there's the crime that happened to you, but the trial is not about you. Right. Fundamentally. It's funny because I think of, you know, justice for insert name as just as a rallying cry that the government now uses against criminals and something that's been co-opted by the need for revenge.

But the idea of like, right, like the system needs to be concerned with justice for the actual victims of crimes. There's also a new idea that we didn't seem to have before the mid sixties. Yeah. And not until like the eighties really, but it starts to, it starts to kind of catch on. I mean, that's, it's wild to think about, but there was just no role that carried out to all of these procedural problems that could be really traumatic. Like the idea started to come out like, huh, if you were the victim of a crime, maybe somebody should notify you when a court date was happening. Like maybe you would want to know. You would want to know if somebody was let out on parole.

So it's like the American legal system is like a shitty house sitter who's like, oh, you wanted me to water that plant? Like, I guess if I'm explicitly ordered to do it, I will. But like I would never gather on my own that this thing needs to happen. Yeah. So you would hear like there were these terrible stories of women running into their rapist or the husband who beat them up like at the grocery store. And you're like, whoa, I thought you were still in prison, but they just weren't told because they weren't, they didn't really have like a place in the criminal justice system. Right. And is it mostly women and feminists that are bringing this to light?

Right. I'm assuming it's not like my car was stolen and I as a victim have left out of this process. I'm assuming that it's crimes that have more of this trauma involved for the, for the victims and they're feeling like this system isn't taking them or the crime against them very seriously. Totally. The figureheads and the voices of this are largely white women talking about violent interpersonal crime. Those are like the most upsetting stories to hear. But what ends up happening, of course, is that the laws that get passed are used against property crime, crimes of possession and stuff. So it gets twisted.

Right. The way it ties back to the Manson family is that you have Sharon Tate, an actress who was coming up in her career when she was murdered by the Manson family. In 1969. Okay. One reason those crimes became such a like media circus is like, wow, you killed like a famous, beautiful actress. She was married to Roman Polanski. Like is no one safe. Okay.

And she was heavily pregnant. She was like eight and a half months pregnant. Oh my God. So Sharon Tate was one of their victims and that's sort of the seed of the victims rights movement. I mean, in some ways, I think there are a lot of these, it's always dangerous, right, to like trace this back to one person or one event. Right. So this stuff was all like, it was a stew that was bubbling, but it gets a lot of energy from Sharon Tate's mother who is after her daughter is murdered. She gets like deeply depressed.

I think she has some issues with pills for a little while as like who could blame her. Yeah. And then a number of years afterwards, she emerges from this, this period of kind of depression and withdrawal into this nascent movement, which is starting to be called the victims rights movement. Maybe I don't think it even necessarily has that name yet, but there's a support group. This is like the era of support groups, right? Like the 70s, I guess, because there aren't message boards and chat rooms yet. Right. No one had read it yet.

And that's another thing that I think is like interesting to think about is for a long time, American culture was not welcoming to people talking about trauma, talking about bad things that happened to them. It was like, you stuff that aside, you do not bring that into the public. Right. In the 70s, that really shifts. And you have these Vietnam vets coming back and being like, this war was awful. I need to tell people about it. And women start talking about sexual trauma, domestic violence, all of these things like start all of a sudden people are talking about the terrible things that have happened to them. And in these groups that are kind of half group therapy, half political action groups, the one that Sharon Tate's mother Doris Tate gets involved in is called parents of murdered children.

P-O-M-C. P-O-M-C. Okay. Which you can imagine like becomes this really powerful lobbying for us because how do you say like, I oppose parents of murdered children. Yeah. The only word in that phrase that doesn't send a stake straight into your heart is of. Right. Right.

Exactly. And so this is this group that kind of starts out like one of these support groups. We're going to meet together. Nobody else understands our pain, but we can talk about it with each other. Like really crucial things and becomes just more and more tuned into like taking legislative action. Like we need to do things. We're not just going to talk about our feelings, but like we need to make our voice heard. So she becomes super involved in this.

And she's this fascinating lady. She's like, we have these women in Texas. They're just as a journalist, they're so incredible to quote. Hot tip. They curse. They're real down home. They're really righteous. And you're like, yes, ma'am.

You just say like, yes, ma'am. So that means Sharon Tate's mom was like good in the media. I assume she's showing up on like the morning shows. Like she seems like she'd be a good vessel to get this issue more attention. She's an amazing vessel. And then also, you know, this is the period when those morning shows or those afternoon shows, I guess those talk shows, that's also kind of a new thing where you have people coming on TV and like telling dramatic stories.

Yeah. The emotion porn. That's what a lot of that was at that time. Like that's even how Oprah started. Yeah. I watched so much morey povich when I was a kid. Oh, my God, me too. And that was a section like America's Falling Apart.

Yeah. That's what we all have in common. So that makes Sharon Tate's mom perfect, right? That she can come on and talk about her beautiful, innocent daughter, pregnant, innocent daughter. Famous daughter. And it's awful. And she really puts herself out there.

I mean, I like probably disagree with her politically about everything, but I would like to give Doris Tate a lot of credit. She goes on these shows and what she will do, she will give her home phone number out and she's just like, call me at any time if you are a victim and you are going through something because she felt like she had been unsupported and people did and people called and it's just like consume this activism totally consumed her life and became like the big project of her life. And it was like a real sincere commitment to these people who were feeling like they weren't

being heard. So what is Doris Tate asking for politically? So one of the big things that comes out of this that we still see today is like the victim impact statement. I guess it's like the translation of the daytime TV confessional to the courtroom in a way. It's the injection of emotion into the judicial system, which we still haven't figured out, right? Like this idea like court proceedings should be this cold, detached, logical, Vulcan event.

Like, okay, well, that seems like wrong and there's a lot that gets left out of it. But then also when you inject emotion, I don't know, it's like such a close cousin to like bias, right? Yeah. One thing that has been happening during the victim impact statement, which happens in sentencing, right? So you have the guilt or innocence phase and then this is like, okay, what kind of sentence are they going to get?

One thing that has been that people have been doing is presenting these memorial videos and this gets challenged in court a lot. There's a good Jill LaPorte article in the New Yorker about the victims rights movement. She's talking about like videos with 140 pictures of the victim as a child with puppies set to my heart will go on, you know, just like a montage. Yeah. And there are like companies that will do this. And then I guess the other side is like people are also making these for offenders, right?

So if it's like, okay, should you get the death penalty? Like maybe it depends on how many cute baby photos of you are out there or whether you can pay somebody $20,000 to make a sentimental video of you. Oh my God. The research has shown that they don't seem to lead to harsher sentences. But there are some like things that are messed up about them like white victims are twice as likely as black victims to make victim impact statements. So it's like, again, certain victims get heard.

And then also that when the jurors are asked how they feel about victim impact statements, jurors have reported that they find victim impact statements made by black victims to be less compelling than those made by white victims. So again, when you allow emotion into the courtroom, it's just like bias rushes in alongside of it. Right. Was there a misogynistic tone to the original objections to victim impact statements? Kind of like, well, we don't want women in our courtrooms talking about their emotions

after assault. Like was that part of the tone or was it actually bringing emotion? I think so totally. Okay. Is that your judge voice? I only have one voice. I'm sorry. Again, like there were failures and gaps in the justice system to deal with victims and

this movement rushed in and exploited and made use of those real failures. Maybe if we had done a better job of creating a justice system that didn't make people feel like doubly victimized or unheard, then there wouldn't have been this like massive reaction, which we're still living with. Well, and you talk about this in your book too, this thing of like, you know, if you're like, I'm doing something for this murdered person, then like if you can sell someone on the responsive, like, oh my God, that murder is so terrible. I feel so sad about it.

And then implicitly, it's like, okay, if you're sad about this murder, then like you agree to this policy I'm selling, then like you can sell literally anything. That's really because we empathize with somebody and then how do you say no to somebody who you just have had this really emotional moment with. But so I guess to answer your question, like she starts advocating and everybody else in this movement, the parents of murdered children groups, a lot of Republican politicians start advocating for this thing called Proposition 8. Which is the original Prop 8.

No, you think they would just like, there aren't enough numbers. There are infinite numbers. Yeah. So in 1982, Proposition 8, let's see, I read this article in a law review, said, both in quantitative and qualitative terms, Proposition 8 made some of the most fundamental changes ever seen in the handling of criminal cases in California and created virtually overnight significant rights for victims of crime. What were the rights specifically?

Like what did it change? And so there are like a lot of little things, like it defines insanity much more strictly. One of the most important things is that it starts this movement to remove or limit judicial discretion and sentencing. So that's where you start getting. Oh, mandatory minimums. Mandatory minimums, three strikes laws, all of these things where it's like the judge shouldn't be allowed to make a decision.

It's like we're going to have these locked in escalating punishments. This is like, we're seeing the reasons why the seventies for the last decade really when you could use an insanity defense or buy property in San Francisco. It like limits, you know, juveniles ability to be tried in a juvenile, all these, all these things that, that just make it harder for offenders. So this is where we start to see this idea that it's victims rights is not about like, let's have a compensation fund. So if somebody gets murdered, you know, we can give them some money for their family,

some money for like counseling or funeral expenses or we should notify victims about things, but it starts to be this, we are supporting victims. We are giving victims rights by being harsher on people accused of crimes. It's also interesting because, I mean, as I came across a lot in the research for the Sex Offenders episode, there's a lot of victims that don't want to come forward against their abusers because they're afraid that they're going to get a life sentence. They're afraid that they're going to get such harsh punishment that it's like, I don't want to send my uncle or whatever to jail for the rest of his life.

So I'm just not going to come forward at all. And so tell me if I'm wrong. It sounds like it keeps victims from asking for leniency or asking for, you know what, I want an apology. I want him to publicly admit what he did and I want nothing else. I don't need him to go to jail forever. It seems like it's kind of taking away those voices too. It's interesting because in Europe, the things that have been passed under the umbrella of

victims rights have enabled more of that, like more kind of flexibility and sentencing and mediation, if that's something that the victim is on board with. But it's exactly the opposite in the US. In the US, the assumption is like only that victims must want the harshest, most punitive, longest sentence possible. That's what victim gets defined as wanting. It's also an interesting structural thing because it also prioritizes crimes that have individual perpetrators and individual victims.

Whereas something like, you know, the water was had lead in it and my child is at an 8% greater risk of having a low IQ as they get older. Like you can't really do a victim analysis statement for that. Like it doesn't have the same emotional impact. So you're prioritizing crimes that have these emotional impacts, which are like murders, rapes, the sort of stranger danger type crimes. Which is very interesting because that's exactly how media coverage of crime functions, where it's like it's not about what actually is the threat that X demographic is most likely to

encounter or what is the kind of crime we see most often in the city or what have you, but like what plays the best? Like what do people want to hear about? What scares people? What gives them a sense of emotional connection? What cooks up into narrative best? Totally. If it's the same rules for a trial or for the legal system as it is for TV news,

then I'm not crazy about that. No, and also a lot of the rhetoric that you'll find when you're reading this stuff from this era of the victims rights movement is that testimony from experts or statistics, those are like actually kind of like deeply offensive, right? What? You're saying these statistics are somehow like contradicting my personal. Is this very populist reaction, right? Which is interesting because these institutions, government, law are all sort of set up with

the purpose of looking at statistics and not emotion. That's the reason why we have the state as a middleman. And that's what it claims to do even if even as it is not doing it. Right, but it's also like there's a reason why we don't structure them as like, I want vengeance. Let's have me, the vengeance instinct driving this process rather than like what is good for society? Like from a public health perspective, public spending perspective, this sounds so bad when

you put it like this, but it's like once you put victims in the driving seat of that process, all of those concerns become secondary. Well, they're not in the driving seat though. They're still in the trunk, right? Because if you're dead, no one knows what you want politically to be done about your own murder. Yeah. So they have a victory in California.

Prop 8 passes. What's sort of the next political step for this movement? Reagan is president. At this point, he found this task force on victims of crime, which is supposed to study and make recommendations about how the federal government can approach this like a crisis. And just like talking about the emotional stakes here. So this is how the chair of that committee introduces it to I think the Senate. Something insidious has happened in America.

Crime has made victims of us all. Awareness of its danger affects the way we think where we live, where we go, what we buy, how we raise our children and the quality of our lives as we age. The specter of violent crime and the knowledge that without warning, any person can be attacked or crippled, robbed or killed, lurks at the fringes of consciousness. Wow. Well, help me with this backpack because we have a lot to unpack. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, okay, before we all dunk on this, which I'm looking forward to, my understanding is that crime rates were actually pretty high at this point and were rising at this point. Like they're obviously using this for purposes that none of us are going to agree with ultimately, but there was a real statistical problem with crime at the time, no? That is true. That is true. But again, like I think like one of the things that riles me up so much about this is that

throughout this report, over and over again, they use this phrase, innocent victims. Oh. Innocent victims. They just can't stop saying it. And it's really hard not to read that as white victims. Yeah. Yeah. Because when you look at the statistics, actually, crime has made victims of us all.

We could all be victims of crime. No, actually, crime is concentrated. Crime victims are concentrated in particular areas. Statistically speaking, like young black men are the ones who are likely to be victims of crime and they're not the ones that are being talked about in this report. Yeah. I don't think we've ever talked about young black men as victims of crimes in America, really.

It's always just like an afterthought of like, and then there's young black men who by existing deserve to have crimes happen to them, deserve to be targeted, deserve to have violence perpetrated on their bodies. Also, I mean, I'll say with all the homeless people that I've interviewed in the last couple of years, like homeless people, statistically, I think it's something like 15 times more likely to suffer an assault. Homeless people, sex workers, drug addicts. Undocumented immigrants, probably, because they wouldn't report the crimes.

But these people all get excluded from this category. Like, no, no, no, no. We're talking about the innocent victims and people who it's like not their fault. So in one way, they want to make this idea of like victimhood extremely broad because they're like, we are all victims. Whether or not anything has happened to you, you are afraid of crime. And so that makes you a victim by proxy. But at the same time, they also want to like super narrow it and say like, well, if it's

in any way your fault, you're not an innocent victim. So you don't count. Right. Well, let me try and say this and see if it sounds right. It's like, whether you're affected by crime in America, whether you're a victim of crime, it's like, if you're like, well, a crime has actually happened to me, but I'm a person of color or I'm homeless or I'm a sex worker or whatever. It's like, no, no, no, not you.

Not you. No, we mean crime crime. Yeah. And then I feel like, well, I have never been affected by a crime directly. I've never had a crime perpetrated against me or anyone I know, but I'm scared of it. And I live in a state of anxiety and I'm a white person. It's like, yes, you ding. Yeah.

Right. It's like victims and waiting. So have you been reading all these old documents and just like freaking out the way that we do every weekend now? The whole Reagan thing is so incredible. That report. Yeah. It's like, wow.

And it starts out, it's kind of amazing. It sort of starts out in like choose your own adventure format because it's like you are a 50 year old woman living alone. And then it like walks you through this like assault and then you're assaulted by the criminal justice system that doesn't pay attention to you. Oh yeah. But it's so interesting how it's like the criminal justice system will pay more attention to you by putting this person in prison for longer, whether they need to be there or not.

Right. And that's when you like look at the recommendations of this task force. There are like, some of the recommendations are not awful, right? There are like four recommendations for police and there are like law enforcement should be trained about how to talk to victims. Law enforcement should inform victims when a case is closed. If people are reporting threatening behavior to them, law enforcement should write that down and take it seriously and follow up.

You know, things where you're like, okay, cool. But the vast bulk of recommendations, there are four recommendations for police. And then I think there are like 12 legislative things which all go like A, B, C, D, E, F, you know, like sub recommendations. And there are things like we should abolish parole. We should just get rid of parole. Wow. We should have no incentives for good behavior.

Just fuck that. It's called like truth and sentencing or something. It's like, yeah, if you get or if you get sentenced to 20 years, you do 20 years. If you get here like truth and sentencing, that sounds good. Yeah. I like truth. I like sentences. Yeah.

Again, like they hate this Supreme Court ruling about evidence obtained in illegal searches. They're like, no, no, no, we should just like get rid of that. I don't even understand how they think this is going to work. They think they should just pass a law contradicting the Supreme Court. They want to make bail higher and make bail more difficult to get. Reading some of this victims' right stuff reminds me of when I was doing all this reporting about essential oils and the way that people thought that essential oils were going to like cure their cancer or their child's autism or something.

It was so upsetting because people had these real needs, right? This sinister multi-level marketing companies that are exploiting people wouldn't have been able to arise if these people's real healthcare needs were being addressed. It's similar here. It's like, yes, there were these real gaps in the criminal justice system. I don't know. There's like the wrong people found those gaps and exploited them. Right.

And I think the real problem is that you have the stories that get told over and over again are these awful stories of interpersonal violence. But the policies that get enacted, like these mandatory minimum sentences or three strikes laws or parole denials, automatic parole denials, the majority of the cases that they actually used on are like drug crimes, right? Like possession crimes where there is not a interpersonal violent action. Right. So really heart-wrenching emotional stories have an impact that is kind of unforeseen

or just like not accounted for. Right. Or like kind of in bad faith because you're like, we need this power so we can use it in this specific way and voters are like, okay. And they're like, great, okay. So whatever. I know that I said that, but like, I don't care. I'm going to use it for this now.

I'm going to use it for prosecuting low-level drug possession offenses. It's just to me, the fatal flaw really is this idea that you have victims on one side and you have like defendants, offenders, whatever on the other side. And these are completely separate groups and that you need to give rights to one and take them away from the other when actually with you like look at any of the demographics or statistics, victims and offenders, like that's a super overlapping group. A lot of people who commit crimes have themselves been victims of crimes, right? So it doesn't have to be that way, right?

If we just were able to imagine ourselves as like, okay, I am potentially going to be the victim of a crime. I would like a system that really affords me dignity and allows me to have some sort of participation. Sure. But also like I could commit a crime. I could be accused of committing a crime. Somebody that I love or care about could be accused of committing a crime.

And I would like the most like strong defenses there as well. You know, I could be either, but the idea is it's like with the splitting of like there's an us and a them and I could only ever be on the side and you are on that side and becomes this war. Yeah. Right. And I would add to that one of the things I find most stunning about Reagan's career was because when he was governor of California in the 70s, when it had one of the most liberal

policies in the country in terms of giving furloughs to prisoners and so on, there was a prisoner who had been furloughed or out on work release and had committed a violent crime, maybe even a murder. And the system itself was under fire and they're like, should we have work releases? Should we have furloughs? Like maybe this is too liberal and Ronald Reagan was like, listen, this is one out of a lot of people. Like ultimately it's a good system.

It's economically very feasible. Right. It's working in the long run. Like let's not get carried away. Right. Yeah. He changed his tune. Yeah.

And this is not just under Reagan. It's under Clinton too. Right. Like a lot of it is under Clinton. Like we've got to stop giving prisoners Pell grants. We've got to stop letting people have family visits. Like all this stuff where you're like, okay, well, what is, how does that in any way impact the victim of a crime?

Like what if a prisoner can take a college class? Yeah. But the thing they just say over and over again is like, well, my, you killed my daughter. My daughter can't take a college class. You know? I was reminded constantly of when I was studying abroad in London when I was 21, the biggest scandal when I was there was that a prisoner was released on furlough, bought a lottery ticket and won.

Are you sure that wasn't a Mike Lee movie? And then what happened? And then like Tony Blair like weighed in and they were like, we're trying to get the money removed. I believe they passed a law that said they can't engage in any like games of chance. Like it's terrible because they can't go to the racetrack now. Yeah. And it's also like people pointed out that like the lottery system has been around for

like six decades. And this is the first time that has ever happened. So if like once every 60 years, a prisoner gets lucky and wins a million dollars and then goes back to jail, what is the terrible outcome there that we're trying to prevent? But it was this massive scandal. Yeah. It's really hard to argue against this person killed my daughter. They should essentially be removed from humanity and given nothing ever again versus like we're

all humans and how we treat the least among us is reflective of us and rehabilitation is possibility. And also methodologically, it sounds really fucked up to say like the father of this murdered child should not have a say in the sentencing of this criminal. I'm sorry. This is what the state does. We've made a calculus based on all these other factors, although we do say that when people ask for clemency for the killers of their family members.

I mean, I guess it's like it's interesting. I guess the other two things that I thought we could talk about one is that like the way that like the victim compensation boards that a lot of these states have. This is also a relatively new idea that started in the 60s that victims would get compensation. And it didn't really catch on with the victims rights movement. This was like not super big for them because it was kind of like too close to welfare. The idea that the state would afford you some money for burial costs or counseling. Right.

And it's like you're saying that no one else can have that. So what if you give this to me? Is it a trick? Exactly. Most states have this now where there's like our victim's compensation funds. You don't have to go and go fund me and they will give you a few thousand dollars to like make sure your murdered child can have a funeral. And it's often like linked to so the one in New Jersey, which I was reading some reporting

on, that like pool of money comes from federal grants, but also commissary fees. Because then you have this big pool of money and the idea is like you can get I think in New Jersey it's five thousand dollars for funeral support and up to twenty five thousand dollars for other support would include mental health counseling. You can get some money to like pay to clean up the crime scene. Right. Because we don't think about all the expenses and just the basic life that goes with it. So far this sounds pretty good.

No, it really is. But the problem is people get denied all the time. Like more than half of the people applying to New Jersey got denied. And this and they have enough money. They have so much money that they were returning federal grant money back to the federal government. It's not they ran out of money. They just like we're just disqualifying people because they weren't the right kinds of victims. So in some cases that's because if you have gotten a criminal conviction or if you have

a warrant outstanding, you don't qualify. There was a story of a young woman who got into the car with a guy who was driving drunk and he crashed the car and she died and she was ruled as culpable in her own death because she got in the car with a guy who was drunk. And then there are also things like you lived with your partner and maybe you were engaged and you had a kid together but you weren't married and so you don't count as a victim. It's just like all of these ways of not reckoning with the reality of people's lives. But then if you're like, well, what's being done for victims or families of victims?

Then, you know, people can be like, well, look at all these prisons we have. Like who can argue with that? I mean, it does seem like really striking the extent to which a huge driver of these kinds of administrative processes is like the existential fear that someone who doesn't deserve it will get money. Yes. Even if it's like a very small amount of money, even if it's like $5,000 for a funeral, it's like, well, they weren't married.

So like at what cost? Yeah, totally. Well, it's all about who counts as deserving. It's like we're running a society as if we're casting a reality show. It's like, who should get compensation for major traumas? It's like, well, only people we like. It gives the lie to the name the Victims' Rights Movement, right? Because if it was a Victims' Rights Movement, you would see every victim as victims.

And then we're immediately looking away from the victim and looking at the offense. Like how can we punish this person? If we're talking about Victims' Rights, like why do we need to talk about the offender at all? Right. I've been thinking a lot about Patty Wetterling, whose son, Jacob Wetterling, was one of the original Stranger Danger Disappearances, and she was a huge Victims' Rights advocate in the beginning of the sort of Stranger Danger Panic. And then now she has shifted and she's now an advocate for reforming the sex offender system

because she thinks that it's gone too far and it's sort of like, don't do this in my son's name. There's literally a law named after her son. Are there other Victims' Rights advocates on the other side that are like, we need to clean up this whole thing? I mean, there was a very interesting moment. This is not a prominent person at all, but because I write about the Manson Family stuff in my book and Doris Tate, Sharon Tate's mother. So she is instrumental in passing Proposition 8.

Proposition 8 is the law that allows victims to speak at parole board hearings and Sharon Tate's mother is actually, I think the first person maybe in the United States or maybe just in California to speak at a parole board hearing. And so she, of course, is like, I think these people should be in prison forever. I think these people are infinitely dangerous. We can never let them out, which is fine. But then a few years later, one of the other Manson Family victims, this woman, Susan LaBerge, whose mother and stepfather were murdered by the Manson Family, she comes to the parole

board hearing and she's been writing letters to Tex Watson, one of the Manson Family murderers in prison. And he has been born again. And she is also a born again Christian and she believes in his conversion. And so she uses her victim impact statement to say, like, I think he should be granted leniency. And this makes Doris Tate so mad. She thinks it's a completely inappropriate use of this, this right that she's advocated

for. And to me, that's such a clear indication of there's only one right way to be a victim. And it's like, and we only want to hear the voice of certain victims. And it's this like punitive, tough on crime voice. And if it's a voice that is saying, actually, I kind of dissent from that, then it's like, shut up. You're harming the victims, even though you yourself are a victim. Because it's a victim impact statement, it's not a victim preference statement, right?

Like they've they've specifically framed it to talk about how you were impacted by the crime and impact is usually connotes a negative impact, right? I guess there was one other thing that like, I don't know if you want to include this or not, but I would like to tell you about. Yeah. So like much of this is happening in the 80s and the 90s, right? Like all these crime bills that are passed. But there's this interesting resurgence of victims rights that's happening now.

What's really fascinating to me is that a lot of it is being driven by this one guy who is super fascinating. Oh, can I do the thing where I ask you guys to Google somebody's picture? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yes, I love this thing. So Google Henry Nicholas mugshot. Ooh.

Ooh. Okay. What? Did it work? He's got his eyes closed. Oh. He doesn't look good, right? No.

He's got kind of a Nick Nolte thing happening if we're talking about mugshots as a genre. Totally. Wow. So Henry Nicholas is a billionaire. He was like, I think the founder or something. He was high up at Broadcom, which is like some tech component company, whatever. And his younger sister was murdered. And he had one of these traumatic situations where his family was not notified that the

man who murdered her was like out on parole and they ran into him at the grocery store. And so he has made it his cause to pass victims' rights amendments to state constitutions. Oh, nothing like a highly motivated rich white guy to change a state's direction. Totally. And so these are, this is Marcy's law. Yes. Which has passed in a lot of states is what you've probably been thinking about. Yes.

These are the ones that passed in 2018. Yeah. Yeah. And he has this brilliant strategy. It started with, I think it was like Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota. He went to a lot of these states that would allow you to pass a constitutional amendment through a ballot initiative. And this is a completely one person funded campaign that is changing the constitutions

of dozens of states across the country. What does Marcy's law do? And so it does a lot of the things that these other laws have done. It's like one of its big things is parole denial. So up to like 15 year parole denials used to not be able to get denied that long before you got another hearing. Wow. It also means like one of its mandates is that the victim doesn't have to be interviewed

by the defense. So that's when people get really worried about, I guess the argument is like, that's super traumatizing, right? Like you're going to grill me about my rape. Well, yeah. But you know, as we all learned in my cousin, Vinnie, there's this thing called discovery. Yeah. So you're essentially like, you know, the defense can't have adequate resources.

That's too traumatic. Yeah. Getting a lot of legal challenges and a lot of people in money of these states, it's opposed by both the defense lawyers association and the like DA offices because it's a super vaguely written law. It's like written kind of from emotion, but it hasn't necessarily been like vetted in all these proper ways. But there's some vague language about like right to speedy proceedings.

And so there's a concern that it's going to like speed up death penalty cases because you know, like it's traumatizing to the victim if this lingers on and on and on. And there are all of these appeals, right? So if we cut down on grounds for appeal, the victim would the victims, the victims, it's all about the victims and the victims would do better if we executed people faster and with less time for retesting a forensic evidence and so on. Yeah. So it's like super new and is being challenged that he's like, he's spending his billions

to like push it through all these state constitutions. But the interesting thing about him, Henry Nicholas is you could see maybe from his mug shot is that he has his own like pretty dramatic criminal past. There's some white collar crime stuff involving stock backdating, but those charges were all dropped. And then he recently six months ago or something got arrested in Vegas. So this is kind of a funny story. He was like staying at the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas and he like couldn't get in the room.

And so he called security and they're like broke down the door and got him in because it was like latched, I think, from the inside. And when they broke down the door, his girlfriend or whatever, the woman that he was staying in this hotel room with was passed out on the bed with like a balloon on her face because she had been doing nitrous. And they were like, oh, and then there was just like drug paraphernalia everywhere. So they were like, it's just extremely stupid on his part. And so they found, hold on, heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and several psychedelic

substances and just like suitcases full of drugs enough that they were investigating him for drug trafficking. Whoa. And meanwhile, he's got this like extremely prominent nonprofit that's doing all this like victims rights. Yeah, it's like crime on crime. It's so funny. His lawyer is saying stuff like, look at him.

He's not a criminal. And so he did recently take a plea deal that completely avoided jail time. He will do 250 hours of community service and twice monthly personal drug counseling and give a million dollars to a rehab facility in Vegas. Oh my God. And so those those laws are still, I think New Hampshire is the only one that didn't pass it, which is like New Hampshire is so independent. Live for your die.

Yeah, exactly. I think that's what's so scrambling about the victims rights movement. And that's why we have to, I think, be really careful as evaluators of like policy and law and stories is that there are these words that we can associate with positive things like victim, right? Like that's something I want to support victims. Yeah, sounds great. We have to be really careful about what gets put under that umbrella.

And we unfortunately have to like read the fine print and like read the whole statement of the proposition or whatever, because these things get weaponized. Like the word victim has has completely been weaponized and it's like a real shame. And also another fucking nutrition label that we have to read. I mean, it's like with all of these things, it's like, oh, now I have to do the work and I have to be skeptical of anyone who wants to pass a law that's like, this is going to feed all the puppies. And then it's like, oh, fuck, now I have to read this thing.

And you read it and it's like, oh, by puppies, we're talking about meth addicts and by feed, we're talking about murder. So we're just defining those terms like that. And and it's like, now I have to do all this work of like, when somebody says like, I'm doing this on behalf of victims, I now have to be like, are you though? And then get into the size eight font on these fucking laws. Right. And how people love to use sex trafficking now is like a blanket cause for infringing

on the rights of anyone, it seems. Yeah, all this sounds great, right? It's like fortified with eight vitamins and minerals. And then you look into it and it's like, all the vitamins are like mandatory minimums and the minerals are three strikes laws. Mandatory minerals. The thing that I feel like keeps getting revealed here is that the victims rights movement feels like something that became co-opted by white supremacy.

And if we're defining a victim in a way where it's like, well, it's not, it's not necessarily about whether you're literally a victim of crime. It's more about how you feel and how much society wants to protect you. And also going through an anecdotally cherry picking crimes were like this kind of person who represents a population that we want to keep under control has assaulted this kind of person who the average voter is sympathetic with and then using that to make some argument about what's happening in society. You know, we've taken something, a movement that began for important reasons

and in good faith and continues to advocate in good faith in many ways for things that still need to happen and still have never happened. But that also is so ripe for being co-opted and has been so thoroughly co-opted by people whose main goal is keeping things as they are and have always been. I just think before you vote on any ballot initiative, Google it and billionaire mug shot.