"When 18-year-old Gordon Fields was slapped with a month in jail last week for assaulting a University of Virginia student, Fields also was told he must pay.

He must pay his victim's medical bills. And he must pay back the community he has hurt, a Charlottesville judge ordered.

How he may do this marks a turning point in the city's criminal justice system.

Fields' conviction of assault and battery by mob is believed to be the first case recommended for Charlottesville's budding restorative justice project, a program involving face-to-face victim-offender meetings, that officials plan to set up by year's end in the juvenile court. Organizers hope to expand the project into General District Court to reach repeat adult offenders drawn to various low-level crimes.

Fields is an adult - and was by four days when the Jan. 25 assault took place - but Commonwealth's Attorney Dave Chapman has said an exception likely will be made so the high school senior may participate in the juvenile program, instead of spending 50 hours in regular community service.

'It could be a much more useful and beneficial outcome than a traditional community service project, like assisting in a nonprofit,' Chapman said. 'It can have a measure of accountability and an opportunity for contrition to be expressed and an opportunity for healing to occur.'

Chapman added that the restorative justice project, still in the design phase, might have to consider ways to make exceptions to include other adult cases that come down the pike.

Like decisions about who to include, what kinds of exceptions to make and how to ensure equal justice, some of the city program's most basic details remain undecided.

And despite the court order entered Thursday by Judge Robert H. Downer Jr. that extended the nascent program to Fields, the restorative justice task force is only at the point of trying to hire someone to resolve possibly thorny issues such as who and which crimes will be eligible.

'We're still in the infancy stage,' said Thomas von Hemert, who heads the Thomas Jefferson Area Community Criminal Justice Board and the task force, which includes city prosecutors and a juvenile court judge.

Von Hemert said before Fields' guilty plea that it was too soon to say who might be eligible to participate. 'Until we have a coordinator and a program on board, it's way ahead of time.'

The program is expected to cost $44,513 annually and be funded by private money, he said. Among the money received so far is $15,200 from Episcopal, Presbyterian and Quaker grants.

Still, the underlying tenets of the restorative justice concept are established and common to many programs nationwide, including six already running in Virginia.

A crime's traditional resolutions - with a judge ordering jail, probation, fines and community service as a result of a conviction - are often inadequate to heal the wounds inflicted on the victims and surrounding community, the thinking goes. To compensate, a court can set up a facilitated program that brings together victims, the convicted criminal and some kind of community representative or panel to sit down and discuss the impact the crime has made.

In this setting a victim can look the offender in the eye and ask why it happened. An offender might hear firsthand the effects of the crime and have a chance to offer an explanation or apology.

And in the end, the group and any family members who have participated can draw up an agreement about what the criminal can do to make it better - to help 'restore' the victim and community to the state they were in before the crime was committed. A judge can order an offender to participate and in some cases the agreement that is drawn up carries the legal weight of a sentence.

If the victim decides not to participate in the meeting, a substitute victim - perhaps the victim of a different but similar crime who volunteers to take part in the process - can sit in, von Hemert said.

'Regardless, what most needs to be learned by the criminal is that actions have everyday consequences, said Dave Pastors, a former area probation officer who heads up a restorative justice program in Staunton.

Pastors said such a realization often is missing from a traditional court resolution. He said a study of 48 teens in his program indicated that eight re-offended within a year. By contrast, 20 out of 48 juveniles on probation for similar crimes a year before the program started committed another crime within a year.

Restorative justice, von Hemert added, is a 'holistic process' that promotes an offender taking responsibility.

'The offender needs to have that impact with the victim to get the empathy,' Pastors said. 'It really does have a powerful impact.'

Agreeing is a group of community members who have come together to support those arrested in the five attacks near UVa in September and January, including the one by Fields, who is a senior at Charlottesville High School. The group has suggested that Fields and the eight juveniles arrested in the attacks participate in a restorative' justice program to mitigate whatever sentences they could get, if found guilty.

According to his plea agreement, Fields must complete 50 hours of community service either through traditional projects or through the restorative justice program - in addition to going to jail.

The prosecutor has described Fields role in the assault on Rugby Road that left one UVa student with a concussion, as 'secondary.' He said after the trial that Fields' role, lack of a criminal record and age were factors in the decision to offer a deal reducing the charge from malicious wounding, a felony, to assault and battery by mob, a misdemeanor.

The five attacks have drawn community and nationwide attention, in part because police said in February that several of the suspects said some victims were chosen because they appeared white.

Chapman said last week that there is insufficient evidence indicating the assaults and robberies were hate crimes.

In response, the European Unity and Rights Organization, a white-rights group led by former Klansman David Duke that demanded the teens face hate-crimes penalties and threatened to mount a protest in Charlottesville, issued a statement saying it will lobby the 2003 General Assembly to repeal Virginia's hate-crimes provisions.

The eight juveniles are expected to appear before a juvenile court judge on April 16." (Adrienne Schwisow, The Daily Progress, April 2, 2002)