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Page 5 of 6
A Death in the Family
“We were a family that didn’t have tragedies,” says Evelyn Dillon. “Many times a child is killed, a mother dies early, or a father dies early. We had parents that lived to be in their nineties, and we had often commented that most people had terrible tragedies—children were rushed to the hospital with broken backs or something—and we just didn’t have things like that happen in our lives.”
All that changed September 23, 1983, when Evelyn’s husband, Mike, was murdered. “Normalcy” vanished.
Less than a month after Mike’s death, Dennis Wittman contacted Evelyn to see how his new victim-assistance program could help her. He’d known Mike, so it wasn’t as if this call were coming from a stranger. “It was the greatest thing that ever happened to me,” Evelyn insists. “I never would have gotten through this tragedy. They went to court with me; they explained everything. It was two years before my husband’s case went to court, and in that period, [Wittman] was with me all the time.”
Evelyn was so impressed with the victim-assistance program that she offered to volunteer. Elegant at 77, she now chairs the Genesee County Crime Victims Support Coalition. “I know how it helped me,” she says, adding that the victim-assistance program works because of Dennis Wittman’s restorative outlook. “It’s his ability, which I’ll bet you don’t find in 10 other people in the world, to work with the offender and the victim at the same time. And neither of them feels that they’ve been done an injustice” by the system.
Working with the victim-support group has been an education, she notes. “The support group has been really fascinating—to see how people change. When they come they’re so devastated. And to see in a short time how suddenly they have hope is rewarding.”
A major component of Genesee Justice is victim-offender reconciliation. In Evelyn’s case that wasn’t possible, in part because her husband’s killer seemed to show little remorse before being convicted and sent to prison.
A Quiet Change
From 1984 through 1997, 181 cases came through Genesee Justice’s pre-sentence diversion track. Of those, 171 were successfully completed with all conditions met. Nearly 80 percent of these were felony charges.
In screening candidates for Genesee Justice alternatives, Wittman looks for three primary elements: remorse for the crime, empathy with the victim, and a willingness to take responsibility. That screening has paid off. “We’ve never had a case explode in our face,” he says.
There have been a few failures, “but I think the compliance and the people successfully completing [their conditions] far outnumber them,” Wittman says.
“I think part of the success here in the past has been not necessarily prosecuting crimes,” Horton adds, “but looking at individuals and prosecuting and sentencing individuals. That is something that you’ve got to be ever vigilant about if you care about these programs.”
“It was a change in tradition,” says Genesee County Sheriff Gary Maha, who inherited the Genesee Justice program from former Sheriff Call. “When I was coming up through the ranks, you’d arrest the perpetrator, he’d go to jail, and you’d refer the case to the district attorney’s office; the case would be handled without any input usually from the victims or any accountability on the part of the offender…There is a place for Restorative Justice in the criminal justice system. I’m sure that there are perpetrators who wouldn’t be the type of person we would want to refer to Restorative Justice, but there is a place for Restorative Justice.
“You have to keep in mind public safety,” Maha cautions. “That’s the number-one issue. If we can operate our criminal justice system less costly to taxpayers, then good for us. But we don’t put anybody out into the community who is a risk, who is gonna create more harm or put anybody in jeopardy. So there’s a lot of screening involved. It is a lot of work, a lot of monitoring, a lot of reporting and keeping everybody in the loop.”
But implementing Restorative Justice is “a tough battle,” he adds. “You have to get people to buy into it or it’s not going to work.” In Genesee County so many people have “bought into it” since 1982 that the investment is paying off. “We don’t have a closed criminal justice system,” Maha notes, in which the police, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and support groups all work their own agenda. “We try to all work together as a multidisciplinary team. When you sit down and start talking with one another, it makes a big difference.”
Maha doesn’t believe the public at large is aware that so many people are involved in providing these alternative programs. As County Manager Jay Gsell notes, “we don’t hear a lot” from the community, which he sees as a “sort of testimonial to the success” of Genesee Justice. If it weren’t working, “I think we would hear what I’d call the strict constructionist saying, ‘Look at all these bleeding-heart liberals. Crime is running rampant in the streets of Genesee County and Batavia, and all these miscreants are out on the streets; we can’t deal with this; let’s lock everybody down,’” he says. “We’re not hearing that.”
What the general public does notice, Sheriff Maha says, is that they feel safe.
Wittman cites a case in point: A teenager who had moved to another state was wounded in a random shooting. Her family, Wittman says, insisted on bringing her back to Batavia—where she would be safe. “I think that says volumes about what the general public feels,” he says.
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