news-record.com

Attorney General Roy Cooper is right: The state ought to make good on compensation it should have been paying crime victims since 1998. In fact, that's the least it can do.

As The News & Observer of Raleigh reports, a bizarre reversal of priorities placed victims only third in line to receive restitution payments from those who wronged them. Of 244,489 cases the newspaper examined, court-ordered restitution was not paid in full in a whopping 80,148 instances. The courts and the state, however, did get paid, to the tune of $8.5 million in fines and court costs, even though a 1998 law clearly called for crime victims to be first on the priority list.

Justice is supposed to be blind, not inept.

The 1998 law had moved victims to the top of the list from fourth, a humane and logical thing to do. But of all agencies, the Administrative Office of the Courts bungled the execution of the law, ranking the victims only third and reducing both the amounts paid to victims and the pace at which they were paid.

The problem stemmed from a court system lawyer's misreading of the law and was compounded by a computer programming error. Ironically, the snafu continued for years, undetected. And it not only flouted the rule of law but the will of the people.

In 1996, North Carolina voters soundly supported a Victims' Rights Amendment to the state Constitution that, among other provisions, spelled out victims' right to restitution. Two years later, the victims rights law followed -- which the courts then proceeded to turn upside-down.

The new director of the AOC, former Wilmington Superior Court Judge John Smith, said he had been unaware of the glitch and promised an almost immediate remedy. But what about those victims who were shortchanged in the past?

Smith admitted that would be much harder, and a staff member in his office suggested that victims individually would have to visit their local clerks of court to seek redress in past cases. Clerks then would have to revisit each individual case, a process that would be onerous and unfair.

That's where Cooper rightly stepped in, setting up a task force through his office of Victims and Citizens Services to assist those who are owed compensation.

For some of the victims, the amounts seem tiny considering the crimes committed: $701 for a man stabbed in the face; $210 for another man robbed at knife point; $600 for a woman repeatedly slit in the face and body with a box cutter.

But it's theirs all the same and the state needs to pay up.