Journey into Darkness (40 page)

The more he observed the situation, the longer he tracked Sedley Alley’s appeals, the more Jack realized that the heart of the problem was the need for habeas corpus reform.

In his quest for justice for his daughter, he had to face a fundamental philosophical and practical question: Do victims and their families have any standing in the criminal justice system? Much of the system is structured—as it should and must be in a society like ours—to protect the rights of the defendant. The issue then becomes: Are those affected by the crime entitled to any relief from their suffering through that same system? Or: Are the rights of defendants and their victims so opposed to each other that both cannot be accommodated at the same time?

Jack started frequenting law libraries for the first time since his own law school days. He began reading up on the history of habeas corpus and how it had evolved over the decades. Then he went up to Capitol Hill, to the congressional committee libraries, reading transcripts of every hearing on post-conviction procedure he could get his hands on.

“I wanted to see who had testified and how they had testified. Maybe I’m a poor researcher, but I couldn’t find a single victim or anyone representing a victim who had ever testified before the House or the Senate on the need for habeas corpus reform. It was always judges or lawyers or jurisprudential experts or academics or legal technicians of one type or another, or politicians, but never victims. And I felt it was important for victims to be heard on this issue.”

There was a series of House congressional hearings during the spring of 1990. Jack offered himself to the committees as a witness, but they couldn’t understand what place someone purporting to represent victims would have testifying about habeas corpus reform. Still, he kept calling, kept visiting Senate and House offices, and kept educating himself.

Jack’s activities came to the attention of Cheri Nolan, deputy director of the Justice Department’s Office for Liaison Services. Accordingly, when Phyllis Callos, president of a prominent nonprofit victims’ rights organization—Citizens for Law and Order, or CLO, based in Oakland, California—] approached the Justice Department’s outreach office about how to get their message out on the need for habeas corpus reform, Nolan recommended that they get in touch with Jack and Trudy. So began a relationship that would make the Collinses among the most prominent, persistent, and effective crime victims’ advocates in the country. Jack and Trudy quickly became CLO’s Eastern Regional Directors. They succeeded in building a coalition of some two dozen victims’ advocates organizations across the country, representing more than fifty thousand members, working to give the movement enough critical mass to carry weight and influence.

Frank Carrington was in many ways the father of the victims’ rights movement in the United States. A former Marine who went into law enforcement, then became an attorney, Carrington wrote several books on the subject and led or served on virtually every panel or commission related to crime victims’ rights. He was a founding board member of the National Organization for Victim Assistance, a chairman of the American Bar Association’s Victims Committee, and a member of the 1982 landmark President’s Task Force on the Victims of Crime. Carrington was not a crime victim or victim family member himself. He had simply observed the effects of crime on families and what he perceived to be serious abuses in the criminal justice system and wanted to do something about them. He carefully and systematically studied the facts and issues to see what habeas petitions were actually accomplishing and who they were actually protecting from unfair treatment. And he came to what he saw as an inescapable conclusion:

“No person in his or her right mind can seriously argue that the otherwise intolerable effects of habeas corpus abuses can be justified because it results in ‘doing justice’ by freeing wrongfully convicted defendants. Basically, then, we have a situation in which victims or survivors of horrible, violent, vicious criminal activity must literally put their lives
‘On hold’ waiting for justice to be done, or at least be perceived to have been done.”

Carrington became familiar with the Collins case shortly after Jack and Trudy joined CLO and was deeply moved by it. He urged Jack to publicize Suzanne’s story and the realities of the criminal justice system as seen by victims. He also encouraged the Justice Department’s Office for Victims of Crime to publish and distribute this story.

Inspired by Frank’s caring and concern, Jack produced a pamphlet, working closely with Lee Chancellor, Executive Director of the Judicial Reform Foundation. On the first page was a beautiful color photograph of Suzanne in her Marine uniform, and a description of what had happened to her and the history of the judicial process after the Tennessee Supreme Court denied Alley’s appeal. Inside was greater detail of the abuses of habeas corpus, including comments by experts on the subject.

The pamphlet was widely circulated. Tens of thousands of copies were read throughout the United States. It came to my attention after Jack came to Quantico to speak to FBI and National Academy classes. I used to keep a stack on my desk at Quantico, offering it to visitors to my office.

Around the same time the pamphlet was published, in early March of 1991, Attorney General Richard Thornburgh convened what was billed as a Crime Summit in Washington, D.C. Held at the Sheraton Park Hotel and calling together experts and interested parties from all over the country for a three-day conference, the summit featured law enforcement personnel, congressmen, state attorneys general, mayors, officials of rape crisis centers, other victims’ advocates and organizations, and about a dozen crime victims and family members. Jack and Trudy Collins were invited to attend. President George Bush came and made a personal statement and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor gave the keynote address, stating her opinion that current habeas corpus procedures represented an endless round of appeals that took place after normal safeguards had been followed and normal appeals exhausted.

At the end of the conference, in a session chaired by Thornburgh, each group was given the opportunity to make a statement summing up its goals and assessing the current
state of affairs. Jack was asked to do the summation for victims. The essence of his remarks dealt with the fact that almost to a person, crime victims agree that next to the crime itself, the most painful burden for them to bear is the lack of finality of criminal convictions. “Until we know that the punishment of those who have savaged us—or our loved ones—is final, we cannot begin to put our lives back together.”

Two months later, on May 7, 1991, Jack first testified before Congress at a hearing on habeas corpus reform called by the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, chaired by Joseph Biden of Delaware. “I wanted to get their immediate attention, not simply to say, ‘Your statutory proposals are horrible,’ but make them feel what it means to be a victim, to have them grasp this type of thing. So I started by describing what happened to Suzanne, comparing her savage treatment on the night of her death with the relatively mild discomfort experienced by her brutal killer, who, thanks to abuses of habeas corpus, is allowed to live many years after his sentence even though a jury and court have said he should be executed. In effect, I said, ‘Let me tell you about the type of creature that’s inhabiting death row.’ I used strong language to describe how he ravaged her and made her suffer.”

Stephen was there in the hearing room. So was Trudy, along with a full gallery who had come to hear a federal appellate judge, an American Bar Association president, the attorney general of California, and a former attorney general of Tennessee, among others. Before the testimony began, Senators Strom Thurmond and Orrin Hatch came down to greet the Collinses, which Jack found both touching and meaningful, the first tangible evidence he’d seen of concern from any member of the legislature. With them was Manus Cooney, a counsel for the Judiciary Committee, who had been staunchly championing Jack’s cause from within the Committee’s professional staff.

One of the main messages Jack wanted to get across was that the post-conviction judicial process, particularly habeas corpus, needed to be treated as a victims’ rights concern.

“Make no mistake about it,” he testified, “habeas corpus
is just as much an issue of victims’ rights and revictimization as it is an issue of jurisprudence or federalism.”

He laid his feelings on the line when he said, “I am a retired foreign service officer of the Department of State. During my overseas appointments, I and my family actively promoted the merits of our democratic way of life and extolled its many by-products, including the criminal justice system. Mr. Chairman, Committee members, I could not and would not do that today. When I came home and our daughter was murdered, our nation’s vaunted criminal justice system showed me and my family its true face. Yes, justice—’ justice aplenty for the killer, with delays, continuances, reviews, stays, tests, hearings, examinations, rehearings, appeals, and petitions. For us, the victims, neglect, uncertainty, waiting, frustration, more waiting, injustice, and growing sense of despair.”

As a result of the hearing, Jack felt the rules of the game had finally begun to change. This was the first time the victims’ perspective on habeas corpus had been presented. He had made the issue human and personal and accessible to the average citizen, rather than an arcane matter for legal scholars.

“We served notice that victims were not going to be quiet any longer.”

They continued building a national victims’ coalition. They contacted small and medium-sized groups throughout the country and got to know the people running them. They asked some of those people who were victims themselves to testify before Congress and publicly relate their personal experiences with the criminal justice system. Senators and congressmen finally began hearing from a wide range of victims on a matter which previously had been reserved for “experts.”

In his retirement years, when most people begin winding down and taking it easy. Jack had become a militant. He and Trudy went on television to get their message across, either by themselves or lending their support to others. They appeared on the Maury Povich show with a couple from Kansas City whose daughter had been viciously raped and murdered. The producer told them it would be good to have
a psychiatrist or psychologist on with them to explain why killers and rapists behave this way.

Jack had just the person. He recommended the distinguished Washington area psychologist Dr. Stanton Samenow, author of such landmark works as
Inside the Criminal Mind
, who, with the late psychiatrist Dr. Samuel Yochelson, conducted a pioneering study on criminal behavior at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Along with Dr. Park Dietz of California, Samenow is one of the few mental health professionals who really understands the criminal personality from the perspective we’ve studied at Quantico. Predictably, many psychiatrists and psychologists who haven’t done the research these two have don’t appreciate their views or their attitudes toward criminal behavior.

On the program, the Collinses and the other crime victims told their stories. Anyone who could do such things must be sick …crazy …insane …right? No. Call him sick if you wish, Samenow explained, but he is not “insane” because he is rationally faithful to his own ideas and values. The perpetrator of this type of crime differs from the rest of us in his character and thinking. We find it difficult to comprehend that someone would
want to
do something so terrible. But that’s the way it is.

As a result of his work on behalf of victims and his impressive performance at the national Crime Summit, Jack was asked by Attorney General William Barr (who had succeeded Dick Thornburgh) to join the Justice Department as special assistant to the director of the Office for Victims of Crime, a job he began in December 1991 and held for two years. His role was to be an official government advocate for crime victims and their families. In that capacity he handled inquiries from victims and victims’ organizations, advised on legislative initiatives, prepared a major proposal for better publicizing the office’s services, counseled, and in general tried to put a human face on bureaucracy and procedure.

Part of that involved traveling around the country, speaking about the Crime Victims’ Fund, a provision of the 1984 Victims of Crime Act, which mandated that criminal fines be placed into a special fund that would be earmarked for direct compensation of victims as well as for various support services. These could include therapy and counseling, battered
women’s shelters, rape crisis centers, and transportation to court hearings, baby-sitting during those hearings, anything that would support victims as they made their way through the system.

Meanwhile, Jack continued speaking out and testifying before congressional committees as Sedley Alley’s collateral appeals dragged on. Hank Williams said, “Jack dedicated himself to keeping Congress on track on this issue.”

What kept him going? What kept him and Trudy so focused on taking on an entire system, no matter what it required of them? They said they simply wanted to see justice done, that they would not have the closure they needed until they’d walked that final mile with Suzanne.

Stephen says, “They feel Suzanne is watching their every move and I think they’re trying to show her even in death how much she means to them. The more they can fight for her and people like her, the more they can show their love. Suzanne died in the process of becoming a mature woman and they never got a chance to enjoy her as an adult. This is their way of dealing with unfinished business.”

Throughout the direct appeals process and protracted collateral review proceedings, Alley’s prosecutors were initially batting a thousand. So he petitioned again, this time appealing the lower court’s denial of his petition for post-conviction relief, and this time it would go to the state Court of Criminal Appeals, to be heard by a three-judge panel in Jackson, Tennessee, in October of 1992. As they did every time anything important in the process came up, Jack and Trudy went to the oral arguments.