Trey Gowdy: “Woman, my mother was a victims advocate in a prosecutor's office when I was growing up. She would come home and lament…”

“Woman, my mother was a victims advocate in a prosecutor's office when I was growing up. She would come home and lament the fact that defendants could pick any lawyer they wanted to defend them, but the victims of crime were stuck with the district attorney. Her message to me, the lesson she was trying to impress on me, is that crime victims have a right to have a good attorney, too. If you fast forward a couple of years, I went to law school, and I became a district attorney. I tried to hire people to come help me do a good job for crime victims. Madam Chairwoman, I was hiring primarily at that time young female prosecutors--Cindy Crick, Kim Leskanic, Jenny Wells, Susan Porter--many of whom had up to $70,000 in student loan debt, could have and should have gone into private practice and paid their loans back and made a lot of money. But something within them wanted to stand up for rape victims and criminal domestic violence victims and child sex assault victims. So they sacrificed the lure of private practice to come to public service. Madam Chairwoman, it is not without irony that the program that my friend from Massachusetts speaks of is named after a man named John R. Justice, who was a solicitor district attorney in South Carolina. He represented the poorest solicitors judicial circuit in the State. They were understaffed and overworked.…”