Guilty victims: how states' failure to separate the innocent from the guilty is costing the victims compensation program millions

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1997 by Joseph Hallinan

More than a decade ago, when Congress established a fund to provide financial compensation to crime victims, it no doubt intended to aid society's least powerful members, especially abused women and children. It probably did not intend to help the likes of Hussein Barmil, a New York fugitive on the lam from the FBI. Or Dean Rossey, who gunned down a Milwaukee teenager. Or Tony Rigor, a twice-convicted California dope dealer with 17-inch biceps.

But it did. What's more, Barmil, Rossey, and Rigor are just a few of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of convicts who receive money each year from the victims compensation program, set up in 1984 for the purpose of reimbursing victims with no insurance or savings. But there is nothing illegal here. No tricks, no fraud. just an unpleasant truism: Victim and criminal are often one and the same person.

Victim advocates seldom mention this fact. Thugs, after all, don't make good poster children. Instead, in their testimony on Capitol Hill and in statehouses around the country, victim advocates almost universally portray their clients as innocents. Which is fine, except that all too often, a surprisingly small share of victims comp money goes to women and children, while significant amounts are shelled out to adolescent and adult males, many of whom have been injured in barroom brawls or street violence, some of whom have serious criminal records. Moreover, unless we tighten the current requirements under which compensation is granted, these not-so-innocent victims will continue collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars in government handouts -- often at the expense of the very people the program was designed to assist.

Crime Does Pay

Meet victims compensation recipient Dean Rossey, a 19-year-old inmate at the Wisconsin state prison in Green Bay. Back in 1995, Rossey recalls, "I was smoking weed and drinking just about every day." He had dropped out of school, dropped out of Narcotics Anonymous, and his mom had kicked him out of their Milwaukee home. On the night of December 13, Rossey, two friends, and a fourth teenager, John Giese, were on a road trip to Illinois to buy some dope. Instead, they turned down a dead-end street and ordered Giese out of the car. They took his coat, the $1,850 they were going to use to buy the dope, a gold bracelet, his pager, and his stocking cap. And after that," says Giese, "they just told me to turn around?

Rossey, according to court records, pointed the gun at the back of Giese's head. Giese remembers him saying, "This ain't nothing personal, it's just business." Then Rossey fired. Amazingly, Giese lived. But Rossey was the one who collected victim's comp. Five months earlier, Rossey and some friends had gotten into a brawl with a carload of gang members. "[One of them] just -- POW -- hit me right in my jaw," says Rossey. "That's when my jaw broke. And I went like that and I spit out my tooth in my hand" Wisconsin's victim comp program paid more than 14,000 to wire Rossey's jaw shut. It also paid for the two weeks of work he missed at Builder's Square.

Not a particularly sympathetic beneficiary of his states victims comp program, Rossey is also not untypical. Milwaukee resident Jon Walecki lost a few teeth (but gained nearly $3,500) after he supposedly called another guy "a fag." Down the road in Madison, I found Toby Vale, a convict injured in a bar fight when he was so drunk he couldn't even remember who, or what, had hit him. He wound up with a broken leg -- and $16,723A9 in victims comp money. When I pointed out these cases to the head of the state's compensation program, she said, "I can't believe they paid this."

But people who work with victims day to day know this goes on all the time. "Unfortunately, there are career victims just as there are career criminals, and they cross back and forth across the line," says Bobbie DeLarRoi, coordinator of the Office of Victim Witness Advocacy in Burlington County, N.J. "One day they might be a victim and the next day the offender."

Criminologists have recognized this pattern since at least 1987, when a research team led by University of Pennsylvania Professor Marvin Wolfgang found young offenders "being predator one day, prey the next" Wolflang's studies also showed that, in adult years, the chance of being a victim of aggravated assault was more than three times as great if the respondents were also offenders. For robbery, the odds were between six and eight times as great.

Just how significant is the overlap between criminal and victim? No one knows. The Office for Victims of Crime at the Justice Department, which administers the federal dollars involved in the program, has never studied the issue. The agency's statistics are so paltry it cannot even tell how many of the compensated victims are men and how many are women; how many are black and how many white -- nor does the program as established by Congress require states to keep records of or even to ask questions about an applicant's criminal past.