State government has a new victim advocate, Michelle Cruz, but she is pursuing the same demagoguery as her predecessor.

Connecticut's criminal-justice system is full of defects that harm crime victims, such as long delays of criminal trials, shortages of prosecutors, and leniency to chronic offenders.

But raising such issues would put hard choices in front of the governor and state legislators, from whom the victim advocate gets her appointment and budget. So instead, she held a seminar to declare the big problem for crime victims is open government and the news media.

News organizations reporting about crime and criminal justice, the victim advocate and her posse complained, are putting crime victims through hell, so the law should restrict public access to police and court records and proceedings.

Without such access there would be no accountability. We would not know that the career criminals accused in the Petit family murders were on parole despite having nearly 40 felony convictions between them. We would not know about plea bargains that discount justice, nor when innocent people are falsely convicted on flimsy evidence, such as James Tillman, a black man falsely convicted of rape based on erroneous eyewitness testimony of a white woman, for which he served 18 years in prison.

Like her predecessor, the new victim advocate seems not to understand that, as a matter of justice, there are no crime “victims,” only accusers until due process of law has been fulfilled.

Someone else’s problem

Should drunks be kept out of shelters for the homeless?

New London’s City Council thinks so. It has lost patience with the local vagrants, particularly those who have made a lifestyle of drinking aimlessly along downtown streets and showing up reliably for meals at the local soup kitchen and warm beds at the local shelter. The council ordered the shelter to give breath tests to its guests every night as a condition of admission, and turn away the drunks.

The shelter is against that. It wants to segregate the drunks from the other occupants. If the drunks can’t get into the shelter they will become the problem of the police or the hospital, and, in the winter, may risk freezing to death. The council thinks that risk is small, figuring the drunks will just move to a more accommodating town.

The issue is how much shelters help people to get back on their feet and how much they just enable bad behavior and attract more vagrants.

Chronic drunks and vagrants handicap already troubled cities and should not be encouraged to concentrate there. But provision has to be made for them somewhere.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.