Racheal’s Law is going national
Racheal’s Law did not become law. Not yet, anyway. The bill, which would have made it easier for survivors of sexual assault to obtain lasting no-contact orders against their rapists, started off so well. It sailed unanimously through two Senate committees and two House committees during this year’s session of the state Legislature. The full House passed its version of the bill on a 66-0 vote with weeks to spare; the Senate passed its version on a 39-0 vote with only four days left in the session.
Despite the bipartisan support and the strong, tireless efforts of Racheal Gonzales — the Racheal behind Racheal’s Law — the bill died when the session ended.
The delay, Gonzales said, appears to have occurred because Senate Majority Leader Michael Sanchez, D-Belen, who happens to be a criminal defense attorney, did not call the bill even when
it was scheduled on the calendar to be heard.
“I even ran into Sen. Sanchez on the day the bill was supposed to be heard by the full Senate. I shook his hand. I said, ‘Hello, sir, our bill is scheduled to be heard today,’” Gonzales recalled. “And he said, ‘Well, it’s on the calendar.’ And I knew this was going to be a problem.”
Sanchez said he takes the blame for letting time slip by without ensuring that either House or Senate version of the bill made its way to the governor’s desk.
“I was assuming our Senate bill would have gone through the House, and it was a surprise when it didn’t,” he said. “Somehow, time got away from us.”
Sanchez said that Sen. Linda Lopez, D-Albuquerque, was the lawmaker who did the most work on the bill and deserved the most credit for it, and that it was her version of the bill — the Senate version — that he believed should have been the one to go to the governor.
Gonzales said she remained hopeful until the very last moments of the session ticked away March 21.
“Even now, I get emotional about it,” she said.
She pauses, her silence barely hiding that emotion, that sting of defeat despite her heartfelt efforts, testifying at every committee hearing, walking the Roundhouse for hours in search of lawmakers to prevail upon, calling every day to check up on the bill, writing, schmoozing, cajoling.
“It was, you know, a very difficult challenge. I knew just even to the last minute it could happen,” she said. “I was hopeful for the victims.”
It has always been about the victims, she said, the ones who even after their attackers were convicted and sent to prison were still not free of those attackers, still not free of having to confront them in court during each successive request for legal, if limited, orders of protection against them.
Racheal’s Law, written as an amendment to the state’s Family Violence Protection Act, would have protected victims of sexual assault from their offenders with a permanent no-contact order that could be granted as part of the sentencing or after the offenders’ release from prison. It also would have permitted victims to be represented by attorneys rather than have to be present themselves at restraining-order hearings.
Both aspects would have protected victims from the emotional trauma of repeatedly having to confront offenders after conviction.
“The reason for this bill is to prevent a victim from having to be re-victimized,” Gonzales told me in January, days before the legislative session began and hope was high.
Now, hope is high again. Racheal’s Law is going national.
U.S. Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham, D-N.M., is expected to introduce a resolution that supports the adoption of Racheal’s Law by each state. The resolution mirrors the state version in general.
Language of the resolution is being completed, said Gilbert Gallegos, Lujan Grisham’s communications director. He provided no date for the resolution’s introduction.
A resolution, Gallegos said, is different from a bill in that it encourages states to pass laws that conform with the intent of Congress, as opposed to requiring state laws and tying that compliance to federal funding.
Having her bill come so close to becoming law in New Mexico and now receiving this national attention has been a heady experience for Gonzales, an educator by profession in Albuquerque.
“It was a new experience for me,” she said. “I think my background in education helped me to communicate at that level to get my message across. It was networking.”
It was also a few other things.
“I crossed my fingers and prayed a lot and hoped for the best,” she said, “hoped God would give me the right words to express.”
Many of those words were deeply personal — Gonzales is also a victim of sexual assault.
The story of how her father, Johnny Gonzales, 64, was convicted in 1987 of raping her at knifepoint beginning when she was 10 was detailed in this column back on Jan. 14.
In that column, she shared how after his release from prison in 2010, he made attempts to contact her through Facebook and a Christmas card.
She shared her story, a very condensed version of it, with lawmakers.
“I told them Racheal’s Law was inspired because I was sexually assaulted, but I didn’t want to portray the story as ‘poor me, poor me,’ ” she said. “I took statistics in and information in to make sure they understood this wasn’t about me. It was about the 293,000 victims of sexual assault every year. It was about how 73 percent of those victims were assaulted by a nonstranger. That’s high.”
(The statistics are from the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey.)
Racheal’s Law may not be about Gonzales, but it is because of her that it has gotten as far as it has.
Even that, she is loath to take credit for.
“Taking this to Washington is very — I can’t even express the word,” she said. “I’m just so hopeful and excited for all these victims who are finally going to have release.”