Howard Morton calls Lewis "a good gal" but believes COVA's priorities reflect the composition of its board. "Most of the board, and certainly most of the executive committee, is made up of DAs or employees of DAs," he says. "Where your paycheck comes from influences you a lot."
Morton's group, Families of Homicide Victims and Missing Persons, has its share of disputes with prosecutors and law enforcement, particularly over the amount of resources allocated to unsolved murder cases. "Quite a few of our members are upset with district attorneys who would not prosecute their cases and left them to remain cold," he notes. When Colorado voters considered an exemption from term limits for district attorneys a few years ago, COVA came out for the measure. Morton opposed it, and wrote what he calls "a very strong letter" to Lewis asking how the board could take such a position without consulting the organization's membership.
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Joe Cannata began aiding crime victims after he wasn't allowed to speak when the killer of his daughter Lynn was sentenced.
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Nancy Lewis is the executive director of COVA, the most influential victim advocacy group in the state.
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Lewis laments that term limits ever passed. "My belief — and this is my belief, not a COVA belief — is that with term limits at the legislature and for district attorneys and even some sheriffs, we have seen a real erosion of people who understand victims' rights," she says.
As for her board of directors being stacked with prosecutors and cops, Lewis says the board includes crime victims, too. "They don't wear something on their forehead that says 'I'm a victim,'" she notes. "Most of them do come out of law enforcement, but our concerns are not system-driven. I think we have parted company with the DAs several times."
To critics like Cain, though, COVA appears to be an unofficial lobbying arm for state prosecutors. "Is it appropriate," she asks, "for this organization, which is really a district attorneys' organization, to get all this money and hire a lobbyist and claim to be an independent group?"
Only a "very, very, very tiny part of our budget" goes to lobbying efforts, Lewis says, and prosecutors scoff at the idea that COVA is a front for their own agenda. Still, the nonprofit and the district attorneys' council often seem to speak with one voice in the legislature — even if, behind the scenes, victims and prosecutors frequently disagree about plea bargains and sentencing options, how vigorously cases are investigated or developed, and other issues.
The fact that prosecutors often claim to represent victims or "speak" for them in legislative matters troubles Boulder District Attorney Stan Garnett. "Advocating for victims is very much a part of the role of the district attorney," says Garnett. "However, district attorneys are not lawyers for victims. Our job is to seek justice and do the right thing in individual cases, and that sometimes means we approve a resolution to a case that the victim doesn't want. We all run across victims who are motivated by personal revenge and other motives that are improper. Victims need to be heard, but they don't control the process."
The same goes for sentencing reform and other legislative battles, he adds. "There are a lot of groups that have emerged that do nothing but be a voice for victims," he says. "That's not the role we should play in legislation."
Cain and others have suggested that the apparent muddling of roles could be addressed if the control of VALE funds were shifted from the judicial branch and the Department of Public Safety to the Department of Human Services. Garnett, though, thinks adding another state agency to the mix would only delay the delivery of services to crime victims and the groups that represent them.
"I don't think that would be an improvement," he says.
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Criminologists often describe families of the victims of violent crimes as "co-victims." The reasoning is simple: Although they didn't suffer the crime themselves, they also were victimized, and the ongoing loss and trauma can alter their lives forever.
Last month, on the National Day of Remembrance for Murder Victims, state representative Rhonda Fields addressed a grieving gathering of co-victims outside the Denver courthouse. Fields spoke of "my crime," and how it had changed her into a victim advocate and prompted her to run for public office. Technically, it was a crime against her son, Javad Marshall-Fields, and his fiancée, Vivian Wolfe, who were gunned down in Aurora in 2005 shortly before Javad was expected to testify as a witness to another murder; the men convicted of the killings, Robert Ray and Sir Mario Owens, are now on death row. But her audience knew exactly what Fields meant.
"We all experience grief very differently," Fields said. "Some of us are still angry, and some of us are in deep depression...but we don't stand alone in our grief. Your pain is my pain."
Like Fields, some co-victims find at least a degree of closure in seeing the perpetrators caught and convicted. Others, though, have to contend with a crime that's never solved, punished or explained. It's that kind of pain that has been the driving force behind Families of Homicide Victims and Missing Persons, and that led Morton and his members to an unusual gambit in the state legislature two years ago — one that demonstrated that the victim movement is far from monolithic in its goals and intentions.
