ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, June 11, 1996 TAG: 9606110049
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAN VERTEFEUILLE STAFF WRITER
Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act in an attempt to appease feminists after Lorena Bobbitt's attack on her husband, throwing "everything into the Act but free meat cleavers."
That's the tongue-in-cheek position on the law taken by the Center for Individual Rights, a Washington, D.C., law firm representing a Virginia Tech football player who has been accused of rape by former Tech student Christy Brzonkala.
Brzonkala is citing the Violence Against Women Act in her federal lawsuit against Tony Morrison and his teammate James Crawford. She says the two raped her in their dorm room in September 1994.
The Washington law firm and local attorneys for the football players urged a federal judge Monday to find that Brzonkala has no rightful claim against their clients. Failing that, they asked him to declare the Violence Against Women Act unconstitutional, which would leave Brzonkala with no federal case against the two players.
Chief U.S. District Judge Jackson Kiser listened to arguments for an hour and peppered both sides with questions, but he made no ruling.
The center has successfully taken on other high-profile cases, including that of a University of Virginia student who won a Supreme Court ruling that the school must fund his Christian magazine the same as it does other campus activities. It also recently fought the University of Texas law school's affirmative action policy on behalf of white applicants and won.
The firm's motto is "Better living through lawsuits."
As one of the first civil cases brought under the untested law, Brzonkala's suit has attracted intense interest. An attorney from the U.S. Justice Department flew to Roanoke on Monday to defend the law, as did a lawyer from the National Organization for Women's Legal Defense and Education Fund.
The law provides the first civil rights remedy for victims of gender-motivated crime, allowing victims to sue their attackers for damages, whether or not criminal charges were filed. They must prove they were attacked because of their gender and that their attackers acted at least in part out of hostility toward their gender.
The Center for Individual Rights charges in its most recent quarterly report that Brzonkala is being used by her attorney and "a gaggle of feminist groups ... on a crusade against misogynists, especially college athletes." But its attorney offered a strictly constitutional argument Monday before Kiser.
While fighting crime is generally a matter left to the states, supporters of the law argue that Congress had the authority to pass the Violence Against Women Act under its power to regulate interstate commerce. They say the country's courts have failed to protect victims of rape and domestic abuse. As a result, women are afraid to take certain jobs, or lose their jobs as a result of trauma from crime, and that affects interstate commerce, supporters say.
But Michael Rosman, an attorney with the Center for Individual Rights, told Kiser that the connection between gender-motivated crime and interstate commerce is "even more tenuous" than that of a law struck down by the Supreme Court last year. The court ruled in 1995 that Congress had gone too far in passing laws affecting local issues under the umbrella of interstate commerce.
Using the rationale of the Violence Against Women Act, Rosman said, Congress could pass national laws concerning divorce or pickpocketing or some other issue now considered a state concern.
By that logic, he said, "there is nothing Congress cannot do."
But John Tyler, a Justice Department attorney, said Congress had ample evidence that gender-motivated crime affects the economy and commerce. He listed some: The No.1 reason freshman women drop out of college is because they were raped; 20 percent of all women will be raped in their lifetimes; half of rape victims lose their jobs or are fired after being assaulted.
Women who are victimized have been denied equal protection under the law by state courts and are "belittled," Tyler said.
In the second part of Monday's hearing, Kiser dismissed All-American football player Cornell Brown from the suit. Brzonkala's attorney, Eileen Wagner, asked for the dismissal after talking to a new witness who Wagner said places Brown somewhere else the night of incident.
Brown, a suitemate of Morrison's and Crawford's, testified in two campus judicial hearings that he saw Brzonkala in their room the night she says she was raped. Wagner has suggested that Brown may not have been there and was only providing an alibi for Crawford. Brown's attorney had threatened to file a motion for sanctions against Wagner if she didn't dismiss him, saying the claims against him were "unfounded and frivolous."
Wagner is appealing Kiser's decision last month to dismiss Virginia Tech as a defendant in the case. She argues that the university gave Morrison preferential treatment after he was found guilty of using abusive language by two campus hearing panels, violating federal discrimination laws. He was suspended for two semesters both times, but the provost allowed him to stay in school on probation. The judicial panels took no action against Crawford.
A grand jury declined to indict the football players on criminal charges after a state police investigation this spring.
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