[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 5]
[House]
[Pages 6506-6510]
[From the U.S. 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

[[Page 6507]]

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 
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

[[Page 6508]]

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 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.

[[Page 6509]]

  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 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 Kurt was born in the 1970s, and my son 
now is a big, old strapping kid in his twenties, and sometimes when I 
look at Kurt, I think about Kevin Wanstrath and the people I prosecuted 
that killed him.
  Kevin Wanstrath 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 Wanstrath, John and Diana Wanstrath, could not have 
children of their own. They were middle-class folks, and so

[[Page 6510]]

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 Wanstrath'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 Wanstrath, Diana 
Wanstrath and Kevin Wanstrath.
  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 Wanstrath home and first shot 
John, then shot Diana and then, while Kevin Wanstrath, 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 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 Wanstrath 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 Wanstrath 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 
Wanstraths in our culture because they have the right to live as well. 
Kevin Wanstrath 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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