[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 44 (Thursday, April 14, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H2093-H2097]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
VICTIMS OF CRIME ACT
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Price of Georgia). Under the Speaker's
announced policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Poe)
is recognized for 60 minutes.
Mr. POE. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak for a group that live in
the silent storm of stressful sadness. They live with the vicious
wounds of being a victim of crime in America. To be a victim, to be
chosen to be the prey by a predator, to have a life stolen or broken by
criminal conduct, Mr. Speaker, it is a terrible and tragic travesty.
But to have your own government desert you, abandon you, too, is an
injustice. It is an injustice to the injured, to the innocent, to the
victims.
Mr. Speaker, the Victims of Crime Act, VOCA, the VOCA fund was
created in 1984 by President Ronald Reagan to provide the most
consistent stable source of funding for services to crime victims. It
included counseling, victim advocacy programs, safety planning, State
victim compensation funds that would help crime victims recover the
costs associated with being a victim. Yet the current budget proposes
to rescind the over $1.2 billion presently in this fund and redirect
its resources to the Department of the Treasury, where it will be
treated in the general revenue. It would go to the greater business of
the general fund.
Mr. Speaker, VOCA funds, these funds that we are talking about, are
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not derived from taxpayers paying dollars to the Treasury of the United
States. But these funds come from fines and forfeitures and fees paid
by convicted Federal offenders. This is an offender's accountability
for the harm they have caused when they committed the crimes against
citizens. It is a wonderful, successful idea. It makes outlaws pay for
the damage they have caused; makes them pay for the system that they
have created. It makes them financially pay the victims for these
crimes.
In fact, there are over 4,400 programs that provide vital victim
assistance services to nearly 4 million victims a year because of these
funds that are contributed by criminals.
{time} 1815
Half of these victims receiving these services are victims of
domestic violence. Other victims are victims of sexual assaults, child
abuse, drunk driving, elder abuse, robbery, assault, and old-fashioned
stealing. They receive this type of assistance through shelters and
rape crisis centers, child abuse treatment programs. Prosecutors'
offices received help, law enforcement agencies and victim advocates.
All of these agencies received funds paid into this fund by criminals.
State crime victims compensation funds with VOCA funds help crime
victims to pay for out-of-pocket expenses that they incurred while the
criminal committed a crime against them. These expenses include medical
care, counseling, lost wages, funeral costs, and many, many more.
You see, when a crime occurs, the victim has no recourse financially
against a criminal, even though the criminal may be convicted and sent
to our Federal penitentiaries. Criminals just do not have any money. So
victims are compensated through this fund through fees paid by other
criminals.
Many victims, when they suffer criminal conduct against them, have no
insurance. This is what they look to to save their livelihood and their
lives. Without victims' compensation funds in the United States, funded
by VOCA programs, paid by the defendants, victims have two choices,
live without this aid or ask taxpayers to pay in some form of taxation
what defendants are now paying for and what defendants should pay for
in the future.
Mr. Speaker, as the founder of the Victims Rights Caucus along with
the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Harris) and on the other side of the
aisle the gentleman from California (Mr. Costa), all of us are united
in this decision that reducing VOCA funding is an injustice to the
people of the United States, the good people, the people who never
asked to be victims of crime but yet they were chosen by some criminal
to be a victim.
It is ironic, Mr. Speaker, this is Victims Rights Week, the week that
we proclaim in the United States the worth and value of victims, and
yet it is the week that the budget is considering to reduce these
funds, take these funds donated by criminals and put it in the general
fund. How ironic this is.
Mr. Speaker, in all of my career I have been involved in the
political process, I have been involved in the justice system. First in
the District Attorneys Office where I served as a chief felony
prosecutor in Houston, Texas, for about 8 years and then a judge in
Texas for 22 years where I saw 25,000, 25,000 defendants come to court
charged with crimes against an equal number of victims. And during all
of that time I have witnessed in the United States the victims'
movement, how victims have been treated in the system. And sometimes we
have forgotten as a people in 2005 how victims have been treated over
the past.
Things have not always been as good for victims after the crime as it
is now; and I think a history lesson is due, Mr. Speaker.
I tried numerous cases as a prosecutor, numerous defendants, death
penalty cases, but I would like to talk about one person who really
showed me the way of how victims continue to be victims after the crime
was committed. And I have changed her name because her family still
lives in Houston, Texas.
Back in the late seventies there was a young lady who was married and
had a couple of sons that lived in Houston, Texas. She worked in the
daytime. At night, she went to school working on a masters degree at
one of our universities.
She left the school one evening. Her name was Lisa. And she was
driving down one of our freeways and she had car trouble so she exited
the freeway, Mr. Speaker, came into a gas station that she thought was
open. It was not open. It was closed, but she did not know that. And
she got out of the vehicle and started talking to an individual that
she thought was a service station attendant.
Luke Johnson was not the service station attendant. He was just
hanging around. One thing led to another, and Luke Johnson pulled out a
pistol. He kidnapped Lisa, took her and her vehicle to a remote area of
East Texas that we call the Piney Woods. He sexually assaulted her and
pistol-whipped her. In fact, he beat her so bad that he thought he had
killed her. Later, when he was arrested, he was mad that he had not
killed her.
Lisa was a remarkable woman. She survived that brutal attack. She was
found about 2 days after she was abandoned in the woods by a hunter
that was going through that area. He stopped, rescued her and made sure
that her medical needs were met.
After she recovered from this vicious attack, Luke Johnson was
arrested and charged with aggravated rape. I prosecuted him for this
conduct. A jury of 12 citizens in Houston, Texas, heard the case, heard
Lisa testify in this case. Luke Johnson was convicted and received the
maximum sentence of 99 years in the Texas State penitentiary as he
earned and as he deserved.
Now we would have hoped as a people, as a culture that justice would
have been done, that we would go on, that life would be good, but that
is not, Mr. Speaker, the world that we live in. Because we live in a
world far different from that.
As Luke Johnson is shipped off to the penitentiary where he belonged,
Lisa could not quite cope with that crime. The first thing that
happened was she never went back to school, never wanted to go on that
campus again. The next thing that occurred was she lost her job. In
fact, she was fired. She could not focus, and she bounced around from
job to job. She started abusing drugs, first alcohol and then
everything else.
Her husband, the sort that he was, decided he no longer wanted her.
He sued her for divorce, convinced a judge in Texas that she was not
mentally capable of raising those children that she had, and he got
custody of both of them. He moved out of the State of Texas where he is
somewhere else in this country today.
Then not long after all of this occurred, Lisa's mother gave me a
phone call and told me that Lisa had taken her own life and she left a
note that I still have in my office today and that note says, ``I am
tired of running from Luke Johnson in my nightmares.''
You see, Lisa faced this entire crime alone. There was no VOCA. There
were no funds for victim advocates that could sit and be with Lisa
through the trial. There were no funds for therapy and counseling after
this crime and after the trial. Lisa was on her own when she testified,
and she was on her own after the crime was over, and she received the
death penalty for being a victim of crime. Luke Johnson, he just spent
a few years in the Texas penitentiary for that crime, and he is running
loose somewhere in Texas.
Times did change from this type of conduct where victims were
abandoned by the process, and we have progressed. When I was a judge,
to show you the example of how people through VOCA make a difference, I
will tell you about a second case.
This case involved a little girl named Susie. A first grader in
Houston, Texas, she walked to school every day and walked home. You
know, in the big city we do not normally like our kids walking to
school or walking home. It is not safe. Susie's case proves the point.
One afternoon, she is walking home from school, a 7-year-old first
grader in Houston. This individual, who had been stalking her for some
time, pulled up beside her, rolled down the window of his pickup truck,
yelled out the window, Hey, little girl. I lost my dog. Can you help me
find my dog?
She stopped long enough for this perpetrator, this predator to jump
out of his vehicle, grab Susie, kidnap her and
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take off. He left Houston, Texas, and went down to the Gulf Coast down
to the beach area of Galveston, Texas, about 50 miles from Houston. He
took her to a secluded portion of that beach area, and he did to that
little girl, that 7-year-old, exactly what he wanted to for as long as
he wanted to do it. After he was through having his way with Susie, he
abandoned her in the darkness of the night and fled. Before he left,
however, he took all of her clothes away from her.
About the time the sun was coming up, Susie, in shock, walking up and
down the beach, was rescued by a sheriff's deputy that was patrolling
the area. She received medical aid and the attention that she needed.
The person that committed this crime was arrested out of State,
extradited back to Texas to stand trial for this crime of aggravated
sexual assault of a child, a 7-year-old girl.
The case was tried in my courtroom. It was sort of a high publicity
case because of who the defendant was. But when Susie took the witness
stand, sat next to me on the witness stand, the prosecutor started
asking her questions and she turned and saw the perpetrator in the
courtroom, she could not say anything. She did not say anything. All
she did was stare at the offender. Eventually, she started to cry. And,
Mr. Speaker, she has cried a long time. She probably thought she was
alone. She was alone, but she could not testify.
Well, what do you do? Well, this was the main witness. Without this
witness, the State did not have a case. The prosecutor asked for a
postponement of the trial. I quickly granted that. We recessed. We came
back a day or two later, and we started up the trial again.
Susie testified, sat next to me and testified. And that day she was
able to testify in detail, graphic detail what happened to her when she
left school one afternoon and what this perpetrator did to her.
The difference, the difference was there was another person in the
courtroom, seated on the back row looking at her, telling her in her
own way, you can testify. You can do this. I believe in you.
Who was it? It was the victim advocate that worked with the District
Attorney's Office that walked that little girl through that case. And
because that woman was in the courtroom and because she had worked with
this victim before and Susie saw her, it gave her the courage to
testify. And that predator, that child predator was convicted of that
case because one person, a victim advocate, was present in the
courtroom.
See, there was a time there were no victim advocates in the
courtroom, and that time has passed, and part of the reason is that
VOCA funds are used to fund advocates of victims in our courtrooms.
One of cases that I tried where I met my first victim advocate was a
case that was called the choker rapist. What this individual did, he
assaulted co-eds from the University of Texas, choked them and sexually
assaulted them. He did this numerous times. He was sent to the Texas
penitentiary. By some error or mistake, having been sentenced to about
700 years in the penitentiary, he was released after a short period of
time. He came to Houston, and he continued these ways of assaulting co-
eds from the University of Houston. He was captured again, and this
case was tried. The victim in that case was similar to Susie in that it
was difficult for her to testify. She was older. She was a college
student.
The first victim advocate that I ever laid eyes on in 1984 was
sitting in the courtroom, helping this witness keep with the trial and
the crime and testifying. That person's name was Anne Seymour, and that
was many years ago. But yet Anne Seymour and many like her work with
victims on a daily basis, and part of the way they are able to take
care of victims is by funding that they get from VOCA each year.
Mr. Speaker, many people do not realize that when the Oklahoma City
bombing occurred, now 10 years ago, that travesty, that assault on
American citizens, VOCA funds were available and used to help those
victims cope with that emergency. And those funds were available
immediately so that victims and their families could be helped.
I would like to read a letter from Marsha Kite. Marsha Kite's
daughter was killed in the Oklahoma City bombing, and her letter states
how she feels as the mother of a murder victim about the VOCA funding.
{time} 1830
She says: We are only days away from the 10th anniversary of the
Oklahoma City bombing and I hear that there is consideration for
emptying out our Federal crime victims fund.
Number 1, this critical fund that is paid for by criminals and not
taxpayers.
Two, the fund helped thousands of families and survivors of the
Oklahoma City bombing, including my own family. The administration
needs to take a hard look at what they are contemplating and realize
the devastating impact it will have on programs that provide direct
services to crime victims, including crisis intervention, emergency
shelters, emergency transportation, counseling and the criminal justice
advocacy programs, all of which were provided to Oklahoma City
families.
Number 3, no person, regardless of life choices or situations, should
be met with the harmful or inadequate services. Each victim should be
provided with the opportunity to access services based on their needs
and not be further traumatized by a system that is neither prepared nor
underfunded.
So, Mr. Speaker, these funds have helped numerous victims and their
families, and it would be a total injustice to cut these funds and put
them in the abyss of the general revenue.
Other examples of VOCA funding go to domestic violence shelters.
Domestic violence shelters are a necessary requirement in our culture,
and good people throughout this United States organize and establish
these shelters to protect victims of domestic violence.
We have such a one in my hometown of Humble, Texas. It is called
Family Time, and Family Time is available on a 24-hour basis for
victims of domestic violence where they can go and find safety when
they have to flee their own homes. If they do not go to these domestic
violence shelters, where will they go?
If it was not for these shelters, many of these abused women would go
directly back to that house and be victimized and abused again. These
shelters are saving their lives. Many of these shelters rely on VOCA
funding, and they would close down without the help of these funds, and
these women and these children would be sent back to an environment of
violence, domestic violence.
These are just a few examples, Mr. Speaker, of how these funds are
spent.
It is interesting how we, as a Nation, are very concerned about the
victims in lands far, far away across the seas, the recent tsunami
crisis, where we have President Bush and President Clinton raising
money in the United States to help these victims. While it is very
important that we show that we are compassionate to peoples all over
the world, Mr. Speaker, charity begins at home, and we need to take
care of our American families first and then the world families, if
necessary.
So we must do both, but we must never neglect our own people, our
victims for some other Nation.
Mr. Speaker, I would like to just continue this history lesson
talking about children, children in the criminal justice system,
specifically children who are the victims of sexual assault.
There was a time, Mr. Speaker, when a child that was sexually
assaulted would have to go through a long process in the criminal
justice system. It in itself was a crime. The victim would be
interviewed, usually by a police officer, a stranger. Another police
officer would instruct the victim to go to the county hospital. They
would wait in the emergency room along with everybody else that goes to
the emergency room. They would be seen by a doctor that may or may not
know anything about sexual assault cases, a doctor that sometimes was
not even available to testify at the trial because they had been sent
to some other hospital in the Nation.
After being seen by this doctor, then the child would have to go to
the police station to be interviewed again, and there were occasions in
my home city of Houston that these victims would sometimes get on the
elevator to go to be interviewed by the homicide detective, and the
perpetrator would be on
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the elevator as well going to be interviewed by another detective.
Then, after this was over with, they would have to go to the district
attorney's office and be interviewed for the trial by a prosecutor,
sometimes a prosecutor that has never tried a sexual assault case, and
eventually the trial would come and those traumas would continue.
Mr. Speaker, we are fortunate to say that those days are over. Those
are no longer the days of children that are sexually assaulted in the
United States because of groups like the National Children's Alliance
here in Washington, D.C., where I am a board member. That alliance has
over 400 children advocacy centers throughout the United States, and
what those centers do is this.
When a child is sexually assaulted, rather than be bounced from place
to place, agency to agency, they are taken to one location, a child
friendly location, and probably the best example of this center is in
Houston, Texas, Children's Assessment Center, that is a privately
funded, publicly funded establishment, and here is what happens.
When a child is sexually assaulted, they go to this center. It is a
very friendly, child friendly center, and they are interviewed only by
child experts. They are interviewed about the crime and what took
place. Their medical needs are met there by qualified doctors and
nurses that deal with child sexual assault victims. The child, after
this occurs, is allowed to talk to a prosecutor that deals only with
child assault cases. The child then, before and after they testify, are
provided therapy and counseling by child psychiatrists and experts, and
they do all of this at the center. Every time they need to be involved
in the case, they go to this one place, very child friendly, and
because of centers like the Children's Assessment Center in Houston,
Texas, and 59 others in Texas, 400 or more in the United States, child
victims are able to cope and recover from the tragedy of sexual assault
against them.
Children's Assessment Center in Houston sees 350 children a month
that have been sexually abused and assaulted. They receive VOCA funds,
as well as funds from the community, from private foundations and the
county government. The funds at the Children's Assessment Center go for
a therapist, a bilingual therapist, that is able to talk to children
that do not speak just English. That therapist, along with other
therapists, will disappear if VOCA funds are cut.
Just to show an impact on these centers, they constantly help kids
cope with the crime. It is more important to help the child recover
than even to have the perpetrator convicted, but they do many things
with these kids to help them realize what has occurred in their own
lives and how they can vent by even writing a letter to the
perpetrator.
I have one such letter that was written by a little girl to the
person who sexually assaulted her that I have received from the
Children's Assessment Center in Houston today, and she starts out her
letter this way.
These are some of the things that I have been wanting to say to you.
I used to think that you were a nice person and that you would never
hurt me. Then things changed. After you began touching me, I thought
that you were not a nice person, and I wondered if you were hurting
Mommy, too. When I think of you touching me, I get very mad, and I
sometimes am sad. You are a jerk and a child molester. Sometimes when I
think of you, I am mad at you for hurting me. I want to tell you that I
am glad you are in jail and you cannot hurt me anymore. If I ever, or
when I see you again I will tell Mommy and call the cops, and I will
make a mad face at you. Ha, ha, you thought I would never tell but now
everyone knows. I also know you did this to my sister, too. It is
signed by a little girl.
Letters such as this help victims, children cope with the crime that
has been committed against them. These Children's Assessment Centers
all over the country, God bless them, are doing a work to save
America's greatest resource, our children. VOCA funds go to these
centers, and without this funding, many of these centers would not be
able to open the doors.
So, Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues in the House on both sides of
the aisle to join me and the other 50 Members and counting who have
signed a letter to the Committee on Appropriations chairman to save the
VOCA funds.
Grassroots victims organizations across the Nation have been flooding
congressional offices with phone calls and pleading for their
representatives to save VOCA and for them to sign this letter that 50
have already signed. Fourteen national victim advocacy organizations
have partnered in support of saving the crime victims fund. And they
are, Mr. Speaker, these organizations that work victims: Justice
Solutions, Incorporated; Mothers Against Drunk Driving; the National
Alliance to End Sexual Violence; the National Association of Crime
Victim Compensation Boards; the National Association of VOCA Assistance
Administrators; the National Center For Victims of Crime; the National
Children's Alliance; the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence;
the National Crime Victim Research and Treatment Center; the National
Network to End Domestic Violence; the National Organization for Victim
Assistance; National Organization of Parents of Murdered Children; the
Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape; the Victim Assistance Legal
Organization; and even way down in Midland, Texas, the Midland County,
Texas, Sheriff's Crisis Intervention Center which has 35 volunteers.
That organization will cease to exist if these funds are cut.
We all are concerned, Mr. Speaker, about the budget, about the
deficit, about Federal spending. We all are in agreement about that,
but maybe we need to reprioritize how we spend money. Maybe we should
reconsider some of the foreign giveaway programs that this country is
involved in, giving away money, and maybe we should think about victims
here at home, remembering that the victims fund, VOCA, is not funded by
taxpayers, but it is funded by criminals, as it ought to be, and they
should continue to pay, pay for the crimes that they have brought upon
the good people of our community.
Mr. Speaker, victims pay. They always pay. They continue to pay after
the crime is over with, and we need to be compassionate and sensitive
about them because the same Constitution that protects defendants of
crime protects victims of crime as well.
Lastly, Mr. Speaker, I would like to talk about a person that I never
met. He was an individual that did not have much going for him. He was
born the same year that my son Curt was born in the 1970s, and my son
now is a big, old strapping kid in his twenties, and sometimes when I
look at Curt, I think about Kevin Wanstraf and the people I prosecuted
that killed him.
Kevin Wanstraf was born in Mississippi. His mother did not want him.
So she dumped him off to some charity. The charity, though, found a
home for him, and the home was in Houston, Texas. The people who
adopted Kevin Wanstraf, John and Diana Wanstraf, could not have
children of their own. They were middle-class folks, and so they found
Kevin, they adopted him, and they made him their son, and they were
happy as a family could be.
But unbeknownst to this family, Diana Wanstraf's brother, Markum was
his name, was plotting to kill this entire family. While he was
plotting to kill the family, Markum Duffsmith, along with three other
henchmen years before, had murdered Markum's own mother, and because of
the way that crime was committed, he was able to convince law
enforcement that it was a suicide, and he was not prosecuted until
after he had murdered his nephew Kevin.
He collected the estate of his mother, and he spent it, and when he
was through spending the money, he needed more money. So he then
plotted this other murder, the murder of John Wanstraf, Diana Wanstraf
and Kevin Wanstraf.
One evening while John and Diana were watching Channel 13 news in
Houston, Texas, two people that Markum had hired, posing to be real
estate agents, forced their way into the Wanstraf home and first shot
John, then shot Diana and then, while Kevin Wanstraf, a 14-month-old
baby, was asleep in his baby bed curled up to his favorite Teddy bear,
clothed in blue terry cloth pajamas, dreaming about whatever those
babies dream about, he
[[Page H2097]]
was murdered. He was shot in the head. He was sacrificed on the altar
of greed.
{time} 1845
Because of the work of a couple of Houston police officers, all those
killers were brought to justice. Two of them received the death penalty
and were later executed, and two received long prison terms.
Over the years, I have kept a photograph of Kevin Wanstra on my desk,
as a prosecutor, as a judge for 22 years, and now as a fortunate Member
of Congress representing the Second Congressional District of Texas.
You see, Kevin Wanstra never made it to his second birthday. He was
denied the right to live. He was a victim of criminal conduct.
Our Nation, Mr. Speaker, needs to be concerned about the Kevin
Wanstras in our culture because they have the right to live as well.
Kevin Wanstra will never grow up, he will never be in the backyard
playing catch with his father, will never play football, never have a
date, never get married, all because he was chosen to be prey, the
victim of a crime.
So our Nation, Mr. Speaker, during this Victims' Rights Week, needs
to be determined. It needs to be reinforced as a culture that we will
not stand idly by while people are maimed and hurt in our culture, that
we will support them, that we will be compassionate toward them, and we
will make sure that criminals who commit crimes against them will pay,
and they will financially pay in the funding of VOCA.
Mr. Speaker, we as a people will never be judged the way we treat the
rich, the famous, the important, the wealthy, the special folks. We
will be judged by the way we treat the innocent, the weak, the elderly,
the children. I hope when we are judged, Mr. Speaker, we are judged
favorably.
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