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Supreme Court strikes down key provision of violent-crime act

The Supreme Court says former Virginia Tech student Christy Brzonkala cannot sue her alleged attackers in federal court

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By Raju Chebium
CNN Interactive Correspondent

May 15, 2000
Web posted at: 7:42 p.m. EDT (2342 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. v. Morrison had little to do with allegations of rape and a lot to do with the constitutional justifications Congress employed in passing the 1994 Violence Against Women Act.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday struck down a key provision of the law that gave women such as alleged rape victim Christy Brzonkala the power to file federal civil lawsuits against their attackers, alleging their civil rights were violated.

The court ruled 5-4 that prosecuting such crimes is the states' responsibility, thus limiting federal power and boosting that of the states. The court ruled that the Violence Against Women Act had no basis in the Constitution's Commerce Clause or the 14th Amendment as the Clinton administration argued.

"To the extent that there is a great deal of violence against women ... this certainly does not send a very good message," said Georgene Vairo, a federal courts specialist at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. "I don't think the court is intending to be anti-women. I think it (the decision) is consistent with the direction the court has been tending to in the last couple of years of not being as respectful of congressional prerogatives."

Vairo acknowledged that women who are victimized can bring criminal prosecutions against their attackers. However, she said, many times a criminal case will move forward only if prosecutors and the police decide that the charges have merit. Vairo said the Violence Against Women Act gave women an alternative of independently filing a civil lawsuit against their attackers, regardless of the status of the criminal cases.

"Taking away that remedy means that there are more people who are violating the rights of women who are going to be able to get away with it," she said.

Vairo said the decision is an example of "judicial activism." In her view, Congress is supposed to be closer to the people and she objects to the Supreme Court increasingly second-guessing Congress.

"We have tripartite system of government and each branch is supposed to be respectful of the other. It's part of this developing line of authority out of the Supreme Court as to who is calling the shots," Vairo said.

The issue before the Supreme Court was whether the Violence Against Women Act was valid under the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution and under the 14th Amendment, which ensures all Americans equal protection under the law.

The Commerce Clause is a provision in the Constitution that gives Congress exclusive powers over interstate commerce. Found in Article 1, Section 8, this power is the basis for a considerable amount of federal legislation and regulation.

The Violence Against Women Act maintains that violence against women has an adverse impact on interstate commerce by reducing women's capacity to produce goods and services used nationwide, stymieing travel because of safety concerns, among others, experts said.

"The human story is the (alleged) rape," said Rodney Smolla, a constitutional law professor at the University of Richmond. "But the legal significance is federalism and the power of the federal Congress to pass laws in areas that had traditionally been left to state and local government."

Legal experts predict that Congress will have to be more careful in passing legislation that may be construed as resembling state statutes. But none of them anticipate a flurry of lawsuits seeking to outlaw a bevy of federal laws.

Some experts did take issue with the ruling, calling it another example of the conservative court shifting power away from the federal government to the states.

"The court is also showing less respect for Congress as an institution," said William C. Banks, a constitutional law scholar at Syracuse University. "That's a dangerous precedent to set because the court is showing less respect for Congress' institutional capacity to make policy decisions."

But others, like Duke University constitutional law scholar William Van Alstyne, said the court was right in the decision.

He said states have laws to prosecute rape and other crimes of violence. Therefore, a federal law against the same crimes would subject anyone acquitted at the state level to double jeopardy -- barred by the Constitution -- by allowing federal prosecution of the same crime, he said. Double jeopardy means a defendant cannot be tried twice for the same offense.

Brzonkala, a Virginia Polytechnic Institute student who publicly identified herself as a rape victim, became the first person to file suit under the 1994 act.

She filed an $8.3 million civil lawsuit against two football players, Antonio Morrison and James Crawford, who she said raped her during an October 1994 party. She said she was so depressed and devastated by the crime that she did not go to the authorities until 1995.

A grand jury refused to indict the two players in April 1996, so Brzonkala turned to the 1994 law.

Her case contended that because she subsequently dropped out of college, she had suffered an economic consequence of a lesser education and poorer job opportunities.

In July 1996, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit before it went to trial.

A divided panel of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that opinion, ruling the Violence Against Women Act was a legitimate use of the Commerce Clause, which gives Congress the authority to regulate business between states.

But the full complement of 4th Circuit judges upheld the original decision, striking down the heart of the act.

The Supreme Court agreed in September to review the matter. The justices tied together two cases, U.S. v. Morrison and Brzonkala v. Morrison.

Congress frequently uses the Commerce Clause to outlaw activities that do societal harm, even if the act in question seemingly has little to do with economics, experts said.

The rationale for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, for instance, was that discrimination hurts the economy. Title VII, or paragraph seven, of the Civil Rights Act, which bars employment discrimination, has clear economic consequences because it prevents people from finding work and keeping their jobs, said Theodore Eisenberg, a civil rights law expert at Cornell University.

The Violence Against Women Act used the same rationale. Experts said the justification was that crimes against women hurt the economy by, say, forcing victims to pay for treatment or making them fearful of traveling out of state because of concern for their safety.

But the narrowly divided court ruled Monday that the connection between gender crimes and their effect on interstate commerce is tenuous at best and constitutionally spurious at worst, experts said.

The court repeatedly quoted its 1995 ruling in U.S. v. Lopez, in which the court struck down a federal criminal law that outlawed carrying guns to schools, saying that was a matter the states, not the federal government, should regulate.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who wrote the majority opinion in U.S. v. Morrison, said only states have jurisdiction in prosecuting crimes in which the victims were targeted because of their gender.

"If the allegations here are true, no civilized system of justice could fail to provide her a remedy for the conduct of respondent Morrison. But under our federal system that remedy must be provided by the Commonwealth of Virginia, and not by the United States," Rehnquist wrote.

Joining him in the majority were Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas. Dissenting were Justices David Souter, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens.

Souter took issue with the majority, stating in the minority opinion that Congress has adequately documented the economic impact of gender-based crimes.

"While Congress did not, to my knowledge, calculate aggregate dollar values for the nationwide effects of racial discrimination in 1964,in 1994 it did rely on evidence of the harms caused by domestic violence and sexual assault, citing annual costs of $3 billion in 1990," Souter wrote.

"Equally important, though, gender-based violence in the 1990s was shown to operate in a manner similar to racial discrimination in the 1960s in reducing the mobility of employees and their production and consumption of goods shipped in interstate commerce," he added.