Elected Officials: Enacting Laws Named after Victims

Legislators engaged in the political process of enact- ing new laws have helped to rediscover specific groups and address their plight. Starting in the 1980s, federal, state, and local representatives real- ized that if they proposed a new law and named it after someone who had suffered terribly in a highly publicized crime, their campaign would gain a great deal of favorable media coverage that would help build support for the law’s passage as well as for their own reelection. All suggestions for revisions and additions to the existing body of laws can be controversial and might provoke opposition, but officeholders who dare to argue against proposed legislation that enshrines the name of an innocent person harmed by a vicious predator run the risk of being branded “antivictim.”

Probably the best-known example of a law bearing the name of a crime victim is the Brady Bill, or more formally, the Handgun Violence Preven- tion Act. The title honors James Brady, President Reagan’s press secretary, who was shot in the head in 1981 by an assassin trying to kill the president (the gunfire killed two persons guarding the president). Passed in 1993, it imposed a computer-based FBI

criminal background check on anyone who seeks to buy a firearm from a federally licensed dealer, in a stepped-up attempt to protect the public from individuals deemed to be dangerous (who had been forbidden by federal law from purchasing fire- arms since 1968, as a reaction to the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963).

Another bill bearing a victim’s name is the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act (originally referred to as the Crime Awareness and Campus Security Act). Named to memorialize a 19-year-old freshman who was raped and murdered in her dorm by another student, it was enacted in 1990. This fed- eral law requires all colleges that receive federal aid to maintain and disclose annual reports about a long list of crimes that take place on or near their cam- puses so that prospective students and their parents can assess the relative risks of attending various insti- tutions of higher learning.

The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act went into effect in 2008. It set up a cold case unit within the U.S. Department of Justice to reopen and investigate bias-motivated murders committed before 1970. Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black teenager, was kidnapped, tortured, shot, and dumped into a river in 1955 by two white racists for flirting with the wife of one of the two men at a grocery store in rural Mississippi (see Anderson, 2011).

The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act was passed by Congress in 2009. Named to commemorate a gay college stu- dent who was beaten to death by bigots, and an African-American man who was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck by white supremacists, the legislation expanded the coverage of the federal government’s hate-crime law, which was originally passed in 1969.

The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, also known as the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA), was enacted by Con- gress in 2006. Named in the memory of a six- year-old who was abducted from a department store and then viciously murdered, the act strength- ened sex offender registration requirements, stiffened

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the penalties of existing laws forbidding sexually abusing and exploiting children, and extended federal authority over kidnappings.

Over the decades, many state legislatures have passed statutes named after victims, such as New Jersey’s Megan’s Law. Commemorating a seven- year-old girl slain in 1994 by her next-door neigh- bor, a habitual child molester, each state’s version of Megan’s Law mandates that convicted sex offenders register with their local police department and that community residents be notified of their where- abouts, so that parents—in theory, at least—can take steps to better shield their children from these potentially dangerous strangers.

Since the 1980s, state and county legislatures nationwide have enacted thousands of new laws named after victims (see Editors, New York Post, 2006; and Lovett, 2006). Two very different con- clusions about the rediscovery of the victim’s plight by lawmakers can be drawn. The first is to view certain headline-making tragedies as a “final straw” that focused much-needed attention on a festering problem, mobilized public opinion, and triggered long overdue legislative action by well- meaning elected officials. The other response is to suspect that vote-seeking politicians are exploiting the media attention surrounding highly emotional but very complicated situations for their own per- sonal advantage (to advance their careers). They grab headlines by proposing a change in the existing body of law that will allegedly prevent such an inci- dent from happening again. The strong feelings evoked by a recent tragedy make it difficult for opponents to question the wisdom of implement- ing the “reforms” these ambitious, headline-seeking politicians propose in the name of the victim.

The task for victimologists is to start out as impartial observers and to gather data to see whether the legislation bearing the name of a vic- tim actually offers any tangible assistance to ease the plight of individuals harmed in this particular man- ner. Also, are these measures really effective in pre- venting innocent people from being hurt by these kinds of offenses in the future, or do they just pun- ish offenders more severely on behalf of those they already injured? Some of these recent legal reforms

enacted to ostensibly reduce the occurrence of a certain kind of victimization might turn out to be ill-conceived, seriously flawed, ineffective, or even counterproductive (for example, see Cooper, 2005).