Historical Overview of Crime Victims' Rights Mentions Jeffrey Epstein Case

2014] CRIME VICTIMS’ RIGHTS 63 to a potential criminal of his rights, they can do the same for his victims. This Part also notes that the Department of Justice and state prosecutors already successfully provide rights to victims before charging. This successful experience strongly suggests that providing rights to victims early in the criminal justice process will not be unduly burdensome. I. THE ISSUE OF RIGHTS FOR CRIME VICTIMS DURING CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS To consider the question of whether victims should have rights during criminal investigations, some understanding of the underlying purposes of victims’ nghts enactments will be useful. These enactments are typically designed to make victims participants in all phases of the criminal justice process.° Congress drafted the CVRA, for example, broadly to make crime victims participants in criminal cases. The Jeffrey Epstein sex abuse case demonstrates the importance of victim participation even before charges are filed. A. A BRIEF HISTORY OF CRIME VICTIMS’ RIGHTS The crime victims’ nghts movement has sought to make crime victims important participants in the criminal justice process. The movement began in the wake of the Warren Court revolution, which extended new rights to criminal defendants.’ With the courts paying increasing attention to criminal defendants, crime victims’ advocates began to argue that the victims themselves had been overlooked. The movement gained great visibility in the early 1980s when President Ronald Reagan appointed the President’s Task Force on Victims of Crime.” The Task Force published a report concluding that “the criminal justice system has lost an essential balance.... The victims of crime have been transformed into a group oppressively burdened by a system designed to protect them. This oppression must be redressed.”!° The Task Force chronicled how crime victims were treated in all stages of the criminal justice process, from the police investigation through 6 See DoucLAs E. BELoor, PAUL G. CASSELL & STEVEN J. Twist, VICTIMS IN CRIMINAL PROCEDURE 3-39 (3d ed. 2010) (describing reforms from a historical perspective), see also, e.g., 18 U.S.C. § 3771(a) (2012). T See BELOOF, CASSELL & TWIST, supra note 6, at 3-39 (describing the history of victims’ rights in American law and the early days of the modern movement). 8 See, e.g., William F. McDonald, Towards a Bicentennial Revolution in Criminal Justice: The Return of the Victim, 13 AM. CRIML. REV. 649, 651-55 (1976). ° Exec. Order 12,360, 47 Fed. Reg. 17,975 (Apr. 27, 1982); see also PRESIDENT’s TASK FORCE ON VICTIMS OF CRIME, FINAL REPORT, at 1 (1982). 10 PRESIDENT’S TASK FORCE ON VICTIMS OF CRIME, FINAL REPORT, supra note 9, at 114. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_014042