Why have victim impact statements?

[Marley23]

@Canadjun

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.

You are much more likely to be killed by someone who knows you than by a stranger. In those cases the killer would likely be aware of the “popularity” of the person they killed before the crime was committed. This page cites FBI crime statistics from 2010 and says that in cases where the relationship between the killer and victim were known, the two knew each other in 78% of cases. Granted, the biggest category there is “acquaintance,” which is kind of broad. But only 22% of the homicides were committed by strangers.

Of course it’s also easy to file this under “stuff people should think about before they kill someone.” Whether the killer is aware of the victim’s popularity or not, the end result is that the person is still dead. Why would it make sense to reduce the punishment just because the offender didn’t know much about the dead person? Ignorance of the law isn’t an excuse; why should ignorance of the effects of the homicide you committed be an excuse?

And beyond all of that, I don’t agree that this is “random” or about “popularity.” As far as I know it’s not like there’s a direct relationship between the number of people giving victim impact statements and the sentence the criminal gets. And maybe that calls into question the point of having these statements in the first place, but without evidence I wouldn’t assume comments like “it’s a popularity contest” or “it’s random” are true.

[Martin_Hyde]

I don’t always agree with a SCOTUS ruling nor do I think we should just appeal to authority to them on every issue, but I think their argument in allowing VIS makes a lot of sense. It’s one area where I do trust a SCOTUS justice, because they all have experience being judges. The key point to me was a VIS doesn’t actually introduce anything new to a sentencing phase, that judges and juries have always considered these factors, and that in our system of justice intangible factors have always influenced sentencing. That’s by design, we don’t want everyone who commits the same crime to get the exact same sentence, so we leave it to either a judge or a jury to sort through the particulars and make the most just decision. That being said, there has been a movement since the 80s to remove a lot of that discretion, especially at the Federal level with strict mandatory minimums and sentencing guidelines. I think that trend has been far worse than leaving things to judicial discretion, because it treats even the most sympathetic criminals the same as the worst.

[Soylent_Juicy]

I think Victim Impact Statements would be great if they weren’t so heavily edited and sanitized by the time they get read in the courtroom. It was refreshing when little Tori Stafford’s father strayed from his written statement and called her killer a “piece of shit”.