October 12th
marks the 20th anniversary of the enactment of the Victims of Crime Act
and the Crime Victims Fund that has collected $6 billion for services to
crime victims since its passage.
The U.S.
Department of Defense Task Force on Care for Victims of Sexual Assault
releases its report and recommendations for preventing sexual assault in
the military and providing a sensitive response to victims. The
recommendations include establishing a single office within the U.S.
Department of Defense to handle sexual assault matters; launching an
information campaign to inform personnel about services available to
victims; and convening a summit to update the definition of sexual
assault and address victim privacy concerns within the military context.
Congress passes legislation defining aggravated identity theft and
establishing penalty enhancements for the crime, i.e., offenders who
steal another person's identity information in connection with the
commission of other specified felonies (i.e., crimes relating to
immigration, nationality, and citizenship and various forms of fraud)
would be sentenced to an additional two years in prison. The legislation
also prohibits the court from ordering an offender's sentence for
identity theft to run concurrently with a sentence imposed on the same
offender for any other crime.
The U.S. Congress passes
the Justice for All Act of 2004, which provides substantive rights for
crime victims and mechanisms to enforce them, and authorizes $155
million in funding over the next five years for victim assistance
programs at the federal and state level. This omnibus crime legislation
enacts the Debbie Smith Backlog Grant Program that provides $755 million
to test the backlog of over 300,000 rape kits and other crime scene
evidence in our nation's crime labs; and authorizes more than $500
million for programs to improve the capacity of crime labs to conduct
DNA analysis, reduce backlogs, train examiners, and support sexual
assault forensic examiner programs. It also includes the Kirk
Bloodsworth Post-conviction DNA Testing Program that authorizes $25
million over five years to help states pay the costs of post-conviction
DNA testing, among other provisions.
