It doesn’t make her any more or less guilty of the crime. And the fact that a relative of the victim is especially pissed off shouldn’t affect the sentence.
Unfortunately, the answer to that question is yes.
It also values the rich more than the poor, the healthy more than the sick, the young more than the old, and Caucasians more than non-Caucasians.
When it comes to justice, none of those things should matter, but unfortunately they do. Which is why (like you) I don’t think we should have victim impact statements in the courtroom. The place for those is in the press.
Yes, but they occur before (and can influence) the sentencing.
Move them to after the sentencing, where they would serve to allow the victim’s family an emotional release, and I’d have no trouble with them.
Why not? Why shouldn’t society decide that murder is a crime not only against the dead person but also against all of the people who love him or her? Murder of a breadwinner may drop his or her spouse into poverty. Murder of a parent of young children may very well screw up those kids for the rest of their lives. Why shouldn’t society value those interests in imposing a sentence?
I would only accept that only IF the murderer knew the indirect ramifications of his action before he did it. Otherwise you are adding a random element to the criminal justice system that shouldn’t be there; a murderer could luck out and get a minimal sentence because it turns out he murdered a single asshole with no kids or he could have bad luck and get the maximum possible because it turns out he murdered a pillar of the community with a loving wife and 6 kids.
And it’s also true that murder of the single career guy might cost society a cure for cancer. And murder of a parent of young children might free those kids from years of abuse at the hands of that seemingly “loving” parent, and a spouse from years of battery.
We don’t have a God’s-eye view of the world. We can’t know who is and who is not more valuable to society, except on the very roughest of terms. Are you sure this is a road you want to walk down?
The way I see it, that random element is there regardless; Allowing victim impact statements into sentencing places the burden of dealing with it on the murderer rather than the victim’s family.
I guess I think this lets the perfect be the enemy of the good, suggesting that our inability to know all of the consequences of a crime should prevent us even from acting upon the harms that we can identify.
What more harm do we need to identify other than that a murder has occurred, and that the perpetrator is deserving of punishment? That’s enough knowledge to pass sentence.
I basically agree with what the court said in Payne v Tennessee (which overruled a ruling from '87 that struck down a death penalty because a victim impact statement was read during the sentencing phase), that historically impact of the crime on the victims has always been part of what judges and juries use to make their decisions. While the specific “form” of a victim impact statement was new, the concept of considering the damage caused by the convicted has always been part of American criminal sentencing. It had only been since the 60s and 70s that lawyers had habitually (Clarence Darrow back in the day aside) started bringing in extreme amounts of “mitigating evidence” to try and explain away on basically any ground they could think of (even asserting pseudoscientific theories) to mitigate their client’s actions. The court correctly recognized in Payne that the prosecution needs to be able to basically do the same or it is an unbalanced affair, and it doesn’t violate any norms of criminal sentencing.
I think one of the strengths of having either a judge or jury actually decide a sentence, instead of just enforce a tightly defined sentencing code, is it allows an introduction of common sense, societal opinion, social conscience whatever you want to call it into the courtroom. Victim impact statements are a way to let the sentencing authority, be it a jury or a judge, get a full idea as to what is going on and what the impacts of the crime were. But the sentencing authority will also hear a vigorous explanation as to why the individual committed the crime and why they should receive leniency.
In some ways, ignoring all of that and just giving everyone the same sentence may seem ‘fair’ but the real world is a lot messier. No two crimes are truly identical, and thus the punishments don’t necessarily need to be the same nor should they. And impact of the crime on its victims is a key part of distinguishing one crime from another. I actually think unbiased sentencing actually leads to far greater miscarriage of justice for the convicted, because it results in everyone being required to serve the same amount of time even if there is significant mitigation. So since mitigation is something we should allow for, I think aggravation or heinousness needs to be considered as well.
There is a late-40s guy, father, lower income who worked at a fast food restaurant who had some prescription painkillers (legal prescription) that he sold to a friend. Because of the number of pills he sold he was immediately subject to mandatory minimums that effectively mean he’ll probably die in prison. The person who turned him in was someone caught in a similar scenario, and since it’s in Florida the judges have little discretion. The judge that sentenced him even said it was a travesty of justice, but he had no alternative available to him.
The only people with discretion in such a system in which sentencing is immutable are the prosecutors, before trial and conviction. However, prosecutors are nowhere near neutral like a judge is supposed to be. They want as many convictions and stats on their record as possible. So the guy who flipped on this “drug trafficker” was someone who had been caught in a similar sting. Florida prosecutors offered him a way out of mandatory decades in prison if he could basically ensnare five other people buy doing controlled drug buys from them. So he goes to his friend and convinces his friend to sell him some of his old painkillers. When this guy was offered the same deal, he basically said he was unable to do that. So sorry, have fun spending the rest of your life in prison for selling a few prescription pills to another person.
That’s the other side of the coin when you say “all you need to know for punishment is the crime and whether they are guilty.”
What I meant by that statement isn’t that we have to treat all murderers exactly the same, but that all murders are fundamentally equal because a human life is a human life. I think it’s morally wrong for the criminal justice system to value the life of a popular person over the life of a homeless wino. No one deserves to be murdered.
Put the victim impact statement at the very end of the trial, immediately after the sentence has been pronounced, and let all the friends and family of the victim give the killer a piece of their mind while he/she has to just stand there silently and take it. I can see that serving a valuable cathartic purpose. But to use it to sway the feelings of the jury is wrong. If the prosecutor can speak for the wino, he can speak for the father of 6 as well.
Also, let’s take Joe Doe and Richard Roe, two murder victims each with a wife, a brother, a sister, and two children. Each man’s family loves him identically the same. They all feel that their respective murder victim was a wonderful man.
But let’s say that John’s family is naturally shy and not very good at public speaking. In fact, they are terrified and refuse to speak to the jury, but only give poor written statements.
Richard’s family, however, are master orators. They all make Daniel Webster look like that one lawyer on My Cousin Vinny. They bring the jury to the point of sobbing and hysterical wailing.
Does Richard’s murderer deserve a harsher punishment that John’s?
Do Leopold and Loeb deserve to get life in prison when anyone without Clarence Darrow as their attorney would have been executed? You’re talking about problems with the criminal justice system that are inherent in not everyone having the exact same lawyer, the exact same set of facts etc. Juries are going to form opinions about victims during the trial regardless of the VIS, and you know a jury will look more harshly on the murder of a child than someone who is a homeless wino (and that fact will most likely be known by the jury, it’s unlikely that would be a secret.) I don’t particularly see how one victim having a more poised or effective oratory from their surviving family is some great tragedy considering all the imbalances we accept from one person to the next during the actual trial phase when guilt and innocence are determined.
The defense and prosecuting attorneys are integral to the entire justice process, and it is unfortunate but inevitable that varying skill levels among them may result in different outcomes. And at least in some cases there is an avenues of appeal, by virtue of prosecutorial misconduct or ineffective defense counsel. IMO testimony of the family of victims, which isn’t subject to any scrutiny or cross-examination, can’t to anything BUT unduly prejudice the judge and jury.
So the guilty person should have the right to tell how wonderful they are and how horrible the victim was, with no chance of a rebuttal? Richard Allen Grier, convicted of raping and killing Polly Klaas, denied the raping because she asked him “Not to do me like my daddy did.”
It’s like the days when a rape victim’s sexual past could be presented in the court room, but the rapist’s past convictions could not.
The prosecutor can rebut or cross-examine the defendant during the trial. If there was evidence of rape, the prosecutor can bring that up again to remind the jury he’s lying. If there’s no evidence, he might even have told the truth. The victim impact statement is not trial evidence, so someone can say anything they want without fear of being challenged. Someone upthread said that family members of the victim lied when they made their statements, resulting in his own relative receiving a harsher sentence than he would have otherwise gotten. I don’t know that this is true, but it is certainly possible.
Family members of the victim can also go to the press to say whatever they want, and it will get much wider attention than a statement in court – unless it is some sensational case that the press is already covering from start to finish.
Finally, I agree with the suggestion of someone else upthread. Let the victims or family members say what they want to the convicted person after sentencing. If the point is to confront the bad guy and vent feelings, this allows it without prejudicing the sentence.
No, victim impact statements aren’t subject to cross-exam. I’m pretty sure having to read from a script that has been approved by all parties counts as “scrutiny” though, which is what the family in this particular case did. Further, the defendant had (and took advantage of) an opportunity to address the jury, a statement which was given while not under oath and which was also not subject to cross-exam. So it’s sort of balanced, I think. Both the victim impact statements and allocution are basically opinion pieces and the jury can take them or leave them, just like with any of the evidence. The difference between them is that the victim’s family was not allowed to advocate for one penalty over another while the defendant was able to argue for the punishment of her choosing.
I don’t mind victim impact statements. Actions have consequences beyond the obvious (dead guy) and I think the lasting effects on the victim’s family, community, and possibly the world can and should be taken into account. I don’t think a jury should base their entire decision on any one thing though, opinion statements included, but I’m not convinced that happens anyway. For this case in particular, they’ve already decided that she’s guilty and that what she did is horrific enough to warrant the death penalty. I have some doubts that anything anybody said in this phase has swayed that jury at all.
Is that a bad thing? The justice system doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and there’s some solid evidence that longer sentences have helped reduce crime. The problem here would be if these things were inherently unjust, and I’m not convinced that they are.
The problem as I see it is not longer sentences, but random sentences. The punishment becomes partially based on factors that were not under the offender’s control when he/she/it committed the crime, e.g. the popularity of the victim. Note that I would consider it a different issue if the offender knew the popularity of the victim **before **the crime was committed. I am only talking about the offender finding out after the act was committed what his victim was like and after he/she/it would have had the opportunity to govern their actions accordingly.
But might that not just be the difference that means that justice and crime are not simply two sides of the same coin?
Justice is justice because of its constraints.