San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin said that the elderly Chinese victim of a racially motivated attack this past February has “expressed interest” in a restorative justice process with one of the two offenders, effectively dropping charges against him.
Before this incident, Boudin had made restorative justice the center of his campaign for San Francisco district attorney. On his campaign website, Boudin laid out comprehensive details of his vision, and one of becoming a national standard for restorative justice. Repeatedly, he claims it to be victim-centered.
However, Boudin’s history of work and scholarship suggests that he is more interested in the rights of offenders than victims of crime, only to care about the latter because it is required in a district attorney role. This, in my mind, puts doubt onto his victim-centered promise. And it brings into question whether the “expressed interest” of the victim in this case was coerced.
Boudin and Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner are notable examples of a growing number of liberal district attorneys with roots in prisoner activism, where offender rights have been the foremost concern.
Restorative justice, however, requires a focus on the victim, whether or not it is part of a larger social movement or pursued alone. Howard Zehr, the preeminent scholar of restorative justice, goes as far as to argue that restorative justice does not exist without a truly victim-centered approach.
Offenders can benefit from restorative justice. Ideally, it leads an offender to genuine remorse and prevents recidivism. They become healthier people and better neighbors. The importance of this comes second, though, to what a victim feels and wants — all of which is to say that restorative justice takes time and cannot be accomplished in haste.
So, I wonder, how did the elderly victim in San Francisco come rather quickly to the conclusion that he wants restorative justice. Were multiple conversations had with him to explain restorative justice? Was there enough time taken to understand the victim, a poor immigrant with little command of English, and to discern whether he feels safe or traumatized?
Contrary to popular belief, restorative justice is not a de facto alternative to incarceration. It often works as complementary to retributive justice. Restorative justice dialogue and incarceration can be simultaneous outcomes. Was this explained to the victim, too?
My concern with the brand of restorative justice that liberal district attorneys are promoting is driven by two cases in Philadelphia with which I am personally connected as a Cambodian American.
The first was Krasner’s dangerous handling of Jovaun Patterson, who shot a Cambodian store owner, Mike Poeung, with an AK-47 in broad daylight. Krasner went forward with a plea deal without notifying Poeung, which is a requirement of the Pennsylvania Crime Victims Act. Poeung was stunned and disempowered, all the while recovering from gunshot wounds. What Krasner did goes against the very purpose of restorative justice, and that is including victims in a judiciary that has historically excluded them.
The other case occurred a decade ago when an armed robber was killed by a police officer in my aunt’s corner store. Both the robber and police officer were black. My aunt is a Cambodian refugee and single mother. During the incident, the robber tied up her employees and threatened to kill them.
Only days after the killing, a community group asked my aunt to speak in a public forum with a restorative justice underpinning. She declined to make a public statement because of fear and trauma. Believing she was hiding something, the community group launched a boycott of her store.
Rather than being treated as the victim of a violent crime, she was treated as the offender. The community group misused restorative justice by deferring my aunt’s trauma to address the robber’s victimization to structural racism. It was a faulty abstraction, at best, that trivialized a violent event by suggesting that the robber is the real victim.
Even if this is true, tact is required. Address the event at hand before larger structural issues, such as in the case of sex crimes. Indeed, the ordering distinguishes the difference between being victim-centered or offender-centered.
The worry is that the emerging brand of restorative justice by liberal district attorneys is a front to a long-standing interest in the rights of offenders and that it is misappropriating restorative justice and victim-centered language to achieve offender-centered reforms.
Reducing incarceration rates and, to a certain extent, the ambition of liberal district attorneys to fix a broken judiciary system warrant support. But certainly not at the expense of victim rights, which includes ample time for a victim of crime to decide what they want.
As Boudin, Krasner, and liberal district attorneys across the country promote restorative justice, there is a need for transparency and oversight in its’ implementation in order to ensure that it remains truly focused on the victims of crime. This, rather than a tool in an assemblage for offender rights where victims of crime come second.
Otherwise, it is not restorative justice at all.
Charles Chear is a Ph.D. student at Rutgers University.
