Arizona Defense Attorneys Lose Challenge to Victim Contact Law

An Arizona law that says members of a criminal defense team may only contact crime victims if they first go through the prosecutor’s office is constitutional on its face, the Ninth Circuit said Thursday in a reversal.

The facial challenge to the Victim Contact Limit “as framed, fails,” said Judge Anthony D. Johnstone for the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. “Even if the court assumed “the challenged applications of the law are unconstitutional, they are not substantial relative to the unchallenged applications,” Johnstone said.

Arizona Attorneys for Criminal Justice and individual attorneys said that the law violates ...