Armstrong leaves national legacy | Marcia Roth

Marcia Roth | Guest Contributor

Show Caption Hide Caption Remembering former Mayor Dave Armstrong Armstrong was the last mayor of the city of Louisville, prior to the merged city and county governments. He strived to make Louisville a vibrant place “to live, work, and play.”

The Mary Byron Project Inc., fostering innovations and strategies to end domestic violence, expresses its deepest sympathy to Carol Armstrong, and all the family of the Honorable David L. Armstrong.

Of all the accomplishments rightly attributed to Armstrong, the greatest will be the role he played in one of the biggest victims’ rights milestones in our nation’s history.

His commitment to serving victims of crime was a cornerstone of his long career in public service. As Kentucky Attorney General from 1984 to 1988, his door was always open to victims’ groups, and he became attuned to the issues associated with being a victim of crime. He was responsible for the Kentucky General Assembly’s passage of the Victims’ Bill of Rights during his term, long before most other states recognized victims as being a pivotal part of the criminal justice system.

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When Armstrong was elected Jefferson County Judge/Executive in 1990, he committed to first righting the county’s finances. His next effort was to open Kentucky’s first Office for Women in 1991. At that time Jefferson County’s elected officers were exclusively men. The mission of this office was to improve the status of women in the county, and its main focus was ensuring that women could be safe at home. The Office for Women Advisory Council formed with community leaders from diverse fields who met monthly with Armstrong to try to ensure a better safety net for families and victims of domestic violence.

Because of his leadership, policies were written, legislation passed, information shared and trust built among groups dealing with this epidemic crime.

But in 1993, it became apparent that there was a hole in the safety net. Mary Byron was murdered as she left work on her 21st birthday. Her killer was an ex-boyfriend who had been released from jail days earlier, even though he faced trial on charges of kidnapping and raping her a few weeks earlier. Mary and her family asked to be notified of his release, but that request went unheeded. Many of us remained haunted by the news footage of Mary’s car filled with balloons given to her by co-workers that night.

The community was outraged, and out of that outrage grew the legacy of Mary Byron and David Armstrong.

Armstrong something needed to change. And realizing that domestic violence victims were most at risk when their perpetrator was released from jail, a system was needed to notify victims.

A year to the day after Mary’s murder, he announced that the county, along with a private company now called Appriss, had developed VINE — Victim Notification and Information Everyday. VINE delivers updates on the whereabouts and release of offenders in the criminal justice system.

“I will always remember the kindness of David Armstrong,” says Pat Byron, Mary’s mother. “During the year that we were dealing with Mary’s death and the trial of her murderer, David kept us informed about the progress of VINE. He was determined that her death would not be in vain.”

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Today, VINE remains the nation’s number one victim notification network, used in 48 states and delivering more than 20 million notifications each year. “While we were working with Jefferson County staff to develop VINE, David Armstrong always made it clear that this was one of his top priorities,” says Michael Davis, co-founder, and CEO of Appriss.

Because of Armstrong’s courage and determination to ensure safety for victims, millions of people throughout the U.S. now have the ability to find peace of mind and safety. He was one in a million and he will be missed.

Marcia Roth served as the first director of the Jefferson County Office for Women and is the founding and current Executive Director of the Mary Byron Project, a national non-profit that cultivates and supports efforts that extend beyond crisis management to attack the root causes of the domestic violence epidemic and help build safer healthier communities. To date, the Mary Byron Project has contributed more than $1 million to domestic violence intervention and prevention programs across the country.