When Victims Refuse to Prosecute

It was among the oddest of courtroom dramas.

The victim declared from the witness stand that she wasn’t really a victim after all; that her husband, former football great Jim Brown, had done nothing abusive on the night she fled her home and called police.

That stuff about how he’d threatened to snap her neck that night, and had choked her in the past and blackened her eye . . . it was all a mistake, Monique Brown tearfully told the jury. A pack of lies. The product of anger and jealousy and PMS.

Can’t we just forget about it? she asked the prosecutor. Cancel the trial and all go home?

The answer is no. Not these days.

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There was a time, 15 or 20 years ago, “when the entire case rested on the victim” in domestic violence situations. “They had to press charges, they had to provide evidence, they had to testify in court,” says Los Angeles Deputy City Atty. Grace Kim Lee.

A reluctant victim translated to no case . . . and then, as now, most victims were reluctant ones.

“Recanting victims occur about 75% to 80% of the time” in domestic violence cases, Lee says.

“You have to understand, we’re dealing with crimes that have been committed in the home, in the context of a relationship that might be considered loving, when there are not bad times.

“There might be children, financial dependence, immigration issues. Or fear. Or shame. As hard as it might be for us to understand why a woman would go back, there are many, many factors.”

And despite the drama and high profile of its principal player, the People vs. Jim Brown was actually “a very ordinary case of domestic violence,” Lee says.

Lee handled the prosecution of Jim Brown last fall. The 63-year-old football legend was charged with making a “terrorist threat” against his 25-year-old wife and smashing the windshield of her car during an argument.

He was convicted of bashing the car but acquitted of threatening his wife, after she testified that she concocted the claim to punish her husband for cheating on her.

The couple left the courtroom hand in hand, then made the rounds of national news shows, denouncing the prosecution as the product of the city’s misguided get-tough policy in the wake of the O.J. Simpson case.

But Lee shrugs off those claims.

“Our job is to hold the defendant accountable, period,” she says. “We were prosecuting cases without the cooperation of the victim long before O.J.

“It’s frustrating when the very people you’re trying to protect are against you. But you have to see the big picture and go forward.”

These days, prosecutors rely on physical evidence and other testimony for corroboration: Did she tell the same story to the 911 operators, the police, hospital officials? Does the defendant have a history of abuse? Are there physical signs of violence, such as a black eye, a shattered windshield, a hole punched in a wall?

“When we file a case, we go forward with or without the victim’s cooperation,” Lee says. “She can go into hiding or refuse to talk or deny that anything happened. She can come into court and testify for the defense, then go home [with the defendant], giving him the satisfaction that she stood by her man.

“And we are still going to do our job . . . to send a clear message that ‘your wife or your girlfriend may say this is OK, but it is not OK. And we intend to hold you accountable.’

“And if we can get him put on probation, it’s no longer her nagging him, getting on his back, telling him, ‘Go to counseling. Don’t hit me.’ It’s the court.

“It’s a crude way to think of it, but it’s like having a dog on a leash. He can go about his daily life, but he has to remain law-abiding, because he is facing the threat of jail.”

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In the Brown case, the football star stunned the court last week by opting for six months in jail rather than submit to a yearlong counseling program for domestic batterers, which would have been a condition of probation. (The jail term has been stayed while he appeals the sentence.)

He will serve his term “with dignity and pride,” he said, rather than be scarred with “a domestic violence stigma.”

I can’t help but wonder about Monique Brown’s dignity and pride.

During her husband’s trial, she told the jury she called 911 not because Jim Brown was violent, but because she hoped police would help her fix her troubled marriage.

Isn’t there something the court can offer her, I wonder. Either she lied to police or perjured herself in court. Isn’t there a counseling sentence she could be made to serve?

“It’s a criminal justice system,” Lee reminds me. “We don’t have jurisdiction over the victims. We try to plug them into resources that are available--counseling, job training, shelters--but each woman has to make her own decision about how to go forward.

“After all, she’s the only one in true danger once we leave that court.”

Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.