Victim's Rights
Victim's rights is one of those things that sounds good, but has no place in our legal system.
Our criminal justice system is about the government asserting its independent interest in enforcing its own laws. The nature of the government's interests should not be determined or dictated by the wishes of private parties, including victims of crime.
This gets confused because, as with all things, practicalities distort principles.
For instance, battered wives sometimes refuse to press charges. As a practical matter, there's no point proceeding with a prosecution where the key witness will not cooperate. But the victim does not, as a matter of law, get to decide whether the state will act in her interest. The state acts in the interest of the state.
And any dynamic of victim versus accused presumes the guilt of the accused. Would anyone suggest that victims have any special rights vis-a-vis someone wrongfully accused of the crime???
Nobody is supposed to be prosecuted or not because of how any citizen feels about anything. It sometimes works out that wa, in the same way that rich people tend not to be convicted of things. There are practical wrinkles in any human system.
And the whole "victim's impact statement" fad as part of the sentencing phase is a creepy distortion of our system. Why should the murder of a friendless hermit be of less interest to the state than the murder of a beloved member of the community?
It is important to be impartial about criminal law. People are people and our feelings tend to change based on the particulars of a case, but legal principle cannot be exposed to such feelings.
Many wrongful convictions are driven by an inappropiate consideration of the effects of a crime, rather than the facts of a case. It is routine for prosecutors to drag in sentimental evidence to paint victims as sympathetic. For instance, say the victim is always described as the loving mother of four beautiful children who will never see their mommy again.
What possible place does that have in a trial? Does that fact have any bearing whatsoever on whether John Doe did or did not shoot the victim? How can the relative sadness or outrageousness of a crime have any bearing on who did the crime?
Prosecuters use the victims, when sympathetic, to increase the enralized desire to convct somebody. Somebody must pay... and this scary looking black man here is as good a candidate as anyone, right?
Victim's rights sounds like a harmless compassionate concept, but it's actually a trend that distorts our civic concept of society and law, and does not dimminish the overall injustice of the system.
