New York May End Blame Game When Deciding Which Crime Survivors Get State Aid

Research has shown that because victim compensation decisions rely on subjective assessments, they can also lead to racial disparities. In a 2024 analysis, University of Michigan professor Jeremy Levine found that Black New Yorkers represented 31 percent of all victim compensation claims in the state — but made up 53 percent of claims denied for contributory conduct. The disparity was particularly acute for Black men, who represented 14 percent of New York claims but 47 percent of contributory conduct denials.

Kira Shepherd, vice president of organizing and policy at Common Justice, a victim services organization that helped spearhead the bill, said these patterns are harmful for survivors in the moment — and down the line. “If they’re denied because they’re criminalized, they aren’t getting the healing they need, and that just causes the cycle of violence to continue,” she said.

The bill, sponsored by state Senator Julia Salazar and Assemblymember Monique Chandler-Waterman, would strike the provision in the law that instructs the Office of Victim Services to use contributory conduct to deny claims or reduce awards, making New York one of the first states to do so. It would also make it illegal for the state to award survivors less money if they privately fundraised for funeral or medical expenses, as it does now. And it would require the office to better publicize itself and to publish regular statistics on applications for aid, rejections, and the reasons it denies applications.

Survivors and their families are sometimes unaware that they’re eligible for victim compensation or confused by the rules around it.

In 2024, Dylan Marino, 21, was stabbed to death by a worker in a Queens corner store. Grainy security camera footage shows the bodega worker chasing Marino, and then Marino chasing him back before staggering away.

The Office of Victim Services sent a funeral home $3,000 for his services, according to Marino’s mother, Kate Dessommes. Months later, however, the agency tried to claw it back without fully explaining why.

“Our investigation of this claim shows that the victim’s own actions contributed to his/her death,” the office wrote in a letter to  Dessommes. “The victim cannot be considered an innocent victim of crime and is not eligible for an award.”

Dessommes attributes the denial to what she says police told her: that Marino had stolen a beer from the corner store. After she appealed, the agency attributed it to the fact that the worker wasn’t charged in the crime, though the statute does not require that.

To Dessommes, the letter felt like another emotional blow. “It added so much more stress to something that was already horrible,” she said through tears.

The Office of Victim Services said it could not “comment on an individual claim due to strict confidentiality laws,” but that there may be “circumstances in which OVS is limited in the information it can disclose, such as when doing so could affect an ongoing investigation or prosecution.”

Mika Dashman, founding director of the Restorative Justice Initiative, a nonprofit that advocates for non-punitive responses to harm, was working with Dessommes when she received the denial. She helped her push the state to stop trying to recoup the funding, which it eventually did.

“I couldn’t believe that an agency that was created to support victims of crime would use blaming language like that,” Dashman said. “The state should not be in the business of arbitrarily determining who is an ‘innocent’ victim and who is a ‘deserving’ victim.”

Aaron Cagwin, a spokesperson for the Office of Victim Services, said the agency reviews each claim “based on the information available at the time.”

“While OVS was required to follow the law as written,” he added, “the agency has always approached its work with a focus on supporting victims and survivors and ensuring that claims were reviewed as thoroughly as possible.”

Advocates and lawmakers have successfully pushed the agency to improve access to victim compensation. In 2023, they fought to remove a requirement that survivors report crimes to the police to qualify for aid. And in 2025, the state budget altered the contributory conduct provision so it can no longer be used against homicide victims, like Marino. In all other cases, however, the conduct restrictions still stand.

“If my child dies, they can no longer be blamed” in a way that denies or reduces compensation, explained Robert Gipson II, a New York attorney and former fellow at Giffords Law Center. But if “I catch a stray bullet and live,” he said, the Office of Victim Services “can still make an arbitrary determination about why I was shot.”

That’s where this year’s bill comes in. If signed, New York would become the second state, after Maryland, to completely eliminate contributory conduct as a factor in victim compensation, according to Gipson, who drafted the legislation and worked with the sponsors’ offices, Common Justice, Safe Horizon, and other groups to get it passed.