Pirro Makes Push To Put Victims First; As the district attorney for Westchester County, N.Y., Jeanine Pirro's skill at prosecuting criminals is being matched by her passion for protecting victims' rights

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 5, 2004 | by Stephen Goode

Byline: Stephen Goode, INSIGHT

Jeanine Pirro is in her third term as the elected district attorney of Westchester County, N.Y., a suburb of New York City. During that time violent crime has dropped by 28 percent in her jurisdiction. Pirro's high-technology crimes unit has caught at least 75 pedophiles and child pornographers in undercover stings, and her office has a 100 percent conviction rate of those caught. Altogether, more than 7,700 criminals, recidivists and felons have been put behind bars during her watch.

And Pirro is as passionate an advocate of victims' rights as she is a prosecutor of criminals. More than 21,000 of the victims of crimes have been assisted by her domestic-violence, child-abuse, elder-abuse and sex-crimes bureaus. Among other projects, she has established a program that provides free peepholes to senior citizens so that they can see who's come knocking at their doors.

Before she became district attorney this remarkable woman was a judge and, before that, a prosecutor in the district attorney's office. She has a 100 percent conviction rate on all the homicide cases she's prosecuted. Pirro is the host and producer of D.A. Pirro Reports, a weekly cable-TV show, and appears on CBS, NBC, ABC and FOX News. She's also the author, with Catherine Whitney, of a new book, To Punish and Protect. Its subtitle sums up its contents: One D.A.'s Fight Against a System That Coddles Criminals. Her book is packed with cases Pirro has worked on directly: stories about violent, cruel criminals caught and convicted for horrendous crimes.

But it's also full of stories about victims, some of whom recuperated from the trauma of the wrongs done to them and others who didn't. Some of them, especially if they were young when crimes were committed against them, turned violent and criminal themselves in later life.

Pirro thinks our criminal-justice system has done victims a great wrong in not treating them with the same respect it treats criminals. Her book, she tells Insight, "is really about the victims. It's about a criminal-justice system that I believe is broken. It's about speaking for those people who don't really have a voice the victims and who, for some reason, we've forgotten about."

Insight: You are an outspoken advocate of victims' rights. What are the rights of victims?

Jeanine Pirro: We say that we punish the criminal and protect the victim, yet we do the opposite. We live in a society that for some reason punishes the victim and protects the criminal. We expend our energy on the criminal defendant, who chose to be a criminal, tending to ignore the citizen who never chose to be a victim. A criminal's history, for example, is precluded from evidence before a jury, yet a victim's life becomes an open book. Every wrong turn the victim ever has made becomes the subject of scrutiny. Their lives become the subject of vague innuendo and tiny grains of doubt are planted: What are the victim's motives? Maybe, if you think about it, the victim had it coming!

For the victim, it's open season. It's no wonder that 50 percent of the victims of violent crime don't come forward. Who could withstand this kind of scrutiny?

Q: You're saying that our justice system has become so concerned with the rights of criminals that we've forgotten that their victims must be taken into consideration too?

A: The problem is very clear. We look at criminal defendants and we apologize for them. We analyze how they got where they are. We engage in what I call a national therapy session in which we say, "Where did we go wrong? How did we lose them? Were they abused as children?" We do all this retrospective analysis of the criminal, but we do no prospective analysis of what happens to victims.

We don't empathize with the victim because to do so would force us to confront evil. It would force us to confront the fact that we ourselves are vulnerable. So what do we do? We blame the victim. We say, "Had you not gone out for that slice of pizza, nothing would have happened to you!" We say, "Had that child not been using the Internet, then she would never have met that pedophile. Had that victim of a robbery and beating not been in that rough neighborhood, then what happened to him would never have taken place."

We blame the victims to exonerate ourselves. To look at crime directly would force us to recognize that we live in the most violent society in the Western and industrialized world. Our rape rate is 23 times that of Italy, our murder rate 11 times that of Japan.

Q: We treat victims this way, yet they are very important in the prosecution of criminals, in bringing wrongdoers to justice.

A: We really cannot prosecute crime without the cooperation of the victim unless we have heaps and mounds of circumstantial evidence. And unfortunately we in the criminal-justice system call upon victims to testify. In some cases, they relive the agony they experienced. For some, it's cathartic and it's therapeutic. For others, it's not.

We use them and then we say, "Goodbye, and good luck with your life!" And as for the criminals, we take care of them. If we send them to jail, we give them three meals a day. We educate them. We give them therapy. We provide them with medication.