On Thursday, for the third year in a row, advocates for victims’ rights gathered at the South Carolina Statehouse in an effort to urge state lawmakers to enhance protections for victims of violent crimes.
This year’s Victims Matter rally, however, happened in what many advocates say is an existential crisis of funding, occurring during a push by some state lawmakers to reform the way judges are selected here.
Last week, the state Senate voted to give the governor some say on the legislative-heavy panel that vets and selects judicial candidates for election.
The proposal, which gives the governor four of what would be 12 appointments to the panel known as the Judicial Merit Selection Commission, or JMSC, was unanimously passed by the Senate after some compromise that state Sen. Wes Climer, R-York, described as a bill that “nobody loves but everybody can live with.”
Advocates for stronger judicial changes want to remove lawmakers entirely from the judicial vetting, selection, and election process.
Climer, who backed removing lawmakers, said the compromise reduces the “undue, outsized influence of legislative politics” on the judicial process.
Various groups have complained that because the JMSC’s makeup is overwhelmingly replete with lawyers, particularly legislators who are lawyers, there is too great a chance that familiarity with judge candidates can lead to favorable outcomes in some court cases.
Reform advocates, however, aimed at more than judges.
Speakers at Thursday’s rally, including Attorney General Alan Wilson, said stronger reforms are needed as a bulwark against crime victims and their families having to relive trauma when the criminal justice system fails them.
“I'm here today standing with men and women who I wish never had to go through this process, but they did,” Wilson said. “And the process re-victimized them.”
Wilson’s comment centered on the case of Jeroid Price, a convicted killer who last year was released early from a 35-year sentence in a secret deal made between Rep. Todd Rutherford, D-Richland, and prosecutor Byron Gipson.
The very next month, the State Supreme Court revoked the deal that set Price free.
But the situation weighed heavily on the parents of Carl Smalls Jr., for whose killing Price was convicted in 2003. Carl Smalls Sr. spoke to the crowd Thursday. He called the deal to free Price an “absolute travesty of justice … an embarrassment to the state of South Carolina, and a black eye to the foundation of justice in this state.”
While Smalls had harsh words for the state of the criminal justice system – referring to it as the “criminal assistance system” – he thanked law enforcement and victims services providers for being there when he and his family needed them.
And he worried about their wherewithal in the face of a shrinking pool of federal money that has kept victim-facing nonprofit agencies in particular afloat.
That pool of money comes through the Victims of Crime Act, or VOCA, a 1984 bill that provides federal financial assistance to states to compensate and assist victims of (mainly violent or sexual) crime, and to expand and enhance direct services to them through various agencies.
From the beginning of this century until 2014, VOCA funding to states annually hovered between a half-billion and $1 billion. But over the ensuing five years, VOCA funding soared, reaching its peak of more than $4.5 billion in 2018.
Then, funding started to wane and VOCA was not being replenished as quickly on Capitol Hill. South Carolina received more than $50 million in VOCA money in 2018.
“This year, it’s down to $12 million,” said Wilson. “We've asked for funding, over $10 million, just as a stopgap until the VOCA money replenishes and it can come flowing back to the state of South Carolina.”
Without the kind of money VOCA had been providing to the state a half-decade ago, some victim advocates worry that nonprofit agencies in particular will dry up.
“If a small nonprofit victim services organization in a rural community closes,” Wilson said, “once those doors shutter, once those advocates are gone, that entity is gone forever. It is nearly impossible to bring it back to life. So what I'm asking the General Assembly to do is let's keep them alive.”
Kimberly Cockrell, a victim advocate with Mothers Against Drunk Driving, said the roughly 700 victim advocates in the state need funding to keep providing valuable services, long after someone is done with the criminal justice system.
“What we do is essential, because we’re basically your cleanup crew,” Cockrell said. “We take care of the victims.”
She added that MADD is “going through a semi-crisis right now” because of the falloff of – and possible further federal cuts to – VOCA funds.
“We are … not fighting for our jobs," Cockrell said, “but fighting for the rights of our victims; to escort them through what should be called the victims justice system.”
