by Richard Prior
Staff Writer
Thirty pairs of eyes were on the five women in the Victim Services Center. The women were white, black, young. One sat in a wheelchair.
Janet Reno, then the attorney general of the United States, was seated in front of them, maybe four feet away. She didn’t want the media around. She just wanted to talk to the victims. The group watched and listened intently to the injustices all five had suffered.
“They all told their stories,” said Eric Smith, who founded the Center. “They told how they just couldn’t have made it through without the wonderful counselors at the Center. And knowing that people cared and stood by them.
“Then they came to the African-American lady. Young, pretty lady. And they said, ‘Please. Tell your story.’ And there was a thunderous silence.
“It was one of those silences when nothing is said, and you wait and wait, and it seems like you’ve been waiting three weeks, but you know it’s only been 30 minutes, and then you know it’s only been a minute.
“Finally, she says, ‘I am a dead person. The only reason I am here at all is because of the dear people at this center.’
“She said, ‘A vicious group of criminals took the only thing that mattered to me in my whole life. I was in my own home. My little baby boy was lying on the couch. I heard a racket outside and gunfire. And then my baby quivered. They’d shot him to death.’
“She just kind of let it out, let it flow, this sad story,” Smith recalled. “All of us listening in horror, even those that had heard it before.
“And I wondered, what in the world is the attorney general of the United States going to possibly say to this poor, injured-for-life lady?”
• • •
Smith can count many accomplishments during his time as a state representative, president of the City Council and director of the Center for Strategic Governance and International Initiatives. He has the plaques and photographs around his office at Florida Coastal Law School to prove it.
But the Victim Services Center is the monument he’ll hang his reputation on.
The turn-of-the-century Victorian home opened in 1992 on land donated by University Medical Center. Another 2,000 square feet were added in 1996 to the original 4,100 square-foot building. It was, and apparently still is, the only building in the country put up to specifically provide services to crime victims.
Smith wonders, out loud and often, why other communities haven’t also seen the need to put victims back at the heart of the criminal justice system.
“There are 40,000 — maybe 50,000 — jails, prisons and halfway houses for accused and convicted criminals,” said Smith, in his office at Florida Coastal School of Law. “Meticulously kept, relentlessly monitored by federal courts, state and federal penal authorities.
“These facilities provide every imaginable right and rehabilitative opportunity for offenders, including an army of defenders, legions of psychiatric and mental health people, rehabilitation specialists. The list goes on and on. All under one roof.
“The victim of the crime, in virtually every jurisdiction and city in America, probably has to go to at least a half a dozen different places, seek them out without much guidance. These jurisdictions have no concept that there needs to be a system of parallel justice, or equal justice, for crime victims, particularly victims of violent crime.
“A one-stop intake facility, representing all the services needed by victims, should be the movement of this century.”
The Center helped 3,000 victims the first year it was open. The staff has been helping an average of 3,200 victims over the past five years.
“In our business, the news is not good,” said the Center’s Planner, Linda Cole. “We did have as many as 3,600 one year. The number does go up and down, along with the crime rate.
“Homicides are up between 18 and 20 percent for the past two years. Home invasions and robbery are up. Sexual assault is the only category that has had a decline.”
Putting the emphasis on victims is not a radical idea, Smith said. It goes back to the Code of Hammurabi.
“The code says if you burn down someone’s dwelling house, the offender and his family had to rebuild,” Smith said. “It was a system of restorative justice. I’m not saying Hammurabi was a perfect man, but the victim was an integral part of the system.”
Medieval kings changed all that when they decreed that crimes were offenses against the crown, not the person who was harmed.
“Only in the last 25 years have we been talking much about restitution for the victim,” he said.
Smith was also the moving force behind passage of the 1977 Florida Crimes Compensation Act.
“That was a small step for victims,” he said. “One of the biggest helps we can extend to victims is for jurisdictions to get this concept of infrastructure, buildings for victims, buildings outside the courthouse. Then you don’t have to worry about going into the courthouse and running into your offender’s brother, who’s going to intimidate or threaten or stalk you.”
The Center offers victims, their families and friends a wide range of services: short-term counseling; information about the court process; referrals to other social, medical and legal services; help completing Crimes Compensation packages; and a support group for battered women.
“They need stabilization first,” Smith said. “You’ve got a gunshot wound or you’re the victim of sexual assault, you need stabilization. You need to be enveloped by at least the same circle of care and concern that the federal and state courts mandate for accused and convicted criminals.”
Victims also need friends and counselors to help them with their immediate problems.
“My car is gone, and it’s the only one I had, and I can’t take my kids to school,” said Smith. “I’ve got to be with my wife now in her time of crisis. Who will care for our children?
“The breadwinner of the family was killed, and we don’t have the money to bury him.
“All those kinds of issues come to bear.”
“We do have counselors. We do have someone when you’re brought in because you’ve been stabbed six times with a knife and need to get to University Hospital. You don’t need to wait until business hours.”
All of the Center’s, all of Smith’s concerns, are aimed at restoring equity in the system, some measure of parallel justice.
Smith looked out the window of his office at the law school.
“For me,” he said, “when you run into situations or hear individual stories, it just makes you feel proud this Center’s in Jacksonville. And you have to wonder what it takes to light a fire and do this all around the country.”