The Victims' Rights movement has made a great deal of progress during the last ten years. Many states now have a process for hearing from crime victims during criminal proceedings (or prior to sentencing), and many have created a process for victims' compensation or restitution from the incomes or assets of their victimizers. It's also much easier in many jurisdictions for crime victims to find out about, or even get notified of, the legal status or location of criminals.

Under the leadership of State Attorney General Janet Napolitano, Arizona has gone a step further: creating a legal right for crime victims to get (unpaid) time off from work to attend court proceedings involving the crime committed against them.

The principle is the same as that underlying the Family and Medical Leave Act, the 1993 Clinton Administration initiative that ensured Americans could get unpaid leave for their or their family members' doctors appointment, or to attend an ill family member. At the time this Act was first proposed, there was much complaining from Republicans that it would simply cost too much for businesses to allow this kind of leave. Since then, of course, it has become part of the landscape of American life, and any costs associated with family and medical leave certainly did not interfere with the longest business boom since the 1960s.

Certainly crime victims have as great a need to attend to the disposition of cases that have affected their lives as anyone with a doctor's appointment or a family illness. Indeed, it's only an accident of jurisprudence that treats crime victims as something other than parties to criminal cases -- as bystanders, or at best, as witnesses, in cases between offenders and the State. Making it easier for crime victims to attend criminal proceedings helps address this gap in the design of our justice system.

Attorney General Napolitano talked about this initiative earlier this week at the DLC's National Conversation in Indianapolis, on a panel of statewide elected officials discussing policy initiatives that reflect clear progressive values. Without question, the victims' rights movement reflects such important values as personal responsibility for criminal acts; the mutual responsibility we owe to each other to fully repair the damage wrought by violent crime; and the community of mutual respect this responsibility represents. Hats off to Janet Napolitano for finding a simple way to help make crime victims whole.