Victim Statements



I agreed with one of the key points in this opinion piece by Helen Rumbelow in The Times in which she argues that victims of crime or their families should not decide the nature of the sentence handed down to criminals.

Because it's quite natural to feel 'murderous' towards criminals even when the guilty have committed lesser crimes than murder, so it would be monstrously unfair to have anyone other than an impartial judge deciding what a person's punishment should be given the circumstances of a particular crime.

The problem is that in many people eyes the criminal justice system often fails to make the punishment fit the crime, the obvious example being that murderers often serve 10 or 15 years instead of the life sentences handed down by the courts.

So a life sentence in the UK very seldom means life and that's the real problem rather than the relevance of a victim impact statement in relation to a particular offence, and the same applies to other categories of crime as well, of course.   


Victim statements are just a cynical trick


By Helen Rumbelow - The Times

Thank goodness that the heartbreaking testimonies of grieving families have no influence over our justice system

You would have to be hard-hearted not to be moved by the account of Colin McGinty’s murder, as described by his parents, Geraldine and Peter. Aged just 21, Colin was stabbed 15 times in a senseless attack. When his parents reached the hospital, they found him so badly injured that he was barely alive, a sight they said will haunt them to their own graves. Colin was just able to whisper to them that he couldn’t breathe, then died, condemning his family to “serve a life sentence of heartache and grief and pain”. You would have to be hard-hearted, or a judge.

When you read what happened next, bear in mind that this story is not directly about the raw pain of the McGintys. It’s about what it means to be judged as a human being. And that means it’s about the rule of law and the democratic principles that underpin it. And, most distastefully, it’s about the modern political tendency, perfected by Tony Blair but continued to this day, of using public relations techniques to patronise the public and blur the lines of the values we hold dear. The McGintys and the British people in general have been shoddily duped by a vote-winning idea that was meant to help us.

The McGintys had steeled themselves to go through the anguish of reading a “victim personal statement” by video link to a parole hearing of their son’s murderers, a right that victims of crime have had since 2001. But, believing the video link had been turned off, the judge, Graham White, then turned his back to the couple, and confided to someone else in the room that he felt awful for the family: “They make these statements thinking they are going to make a difference, but they make no difference at all. Someone should tell them.”

Judge White’s words have caused the usual populist paroxysms. He has been forced, predictably, to make an apology. The Parole Board has, of course, been forced to announce an inquiry. Sadiq Khan, the shadow justice secretary, has used the occasion to plug Labour’s idea of a “victim’s law”. All of it sentimental nonsense of the worst kind. For Judge White was right. Victim statements make no difference to sentencing or parole, and rightly so.

Let’s pause here and imagine a world in which victim personal statements did have an effect on punishment. From the beginning, the Blair government heavily hinted this was the case, with some vague spiel that judges should “consider” them when it came to sentencing.When these statements first started being read in court, newspapers, this one included, took to running them in full. Who could turn away from these agonised descriptions of loss? It was the birth of a new kind of folk literature that almost defined emotive writing.

But then, over time, the stories would have to be exceptionally wretched to compete with those that had gone before. Hang on: perhaps families who could craft the most compelling statements — those with a journalistic streak let’s say — would be able to exact better justice than those rendered dumb by grief.

Or what about the victims who weren’t as popular or loved, whose family’s personal statement was a bit half-hearted, or not even bothered with: did their attackers get off lightly? Should canny criminals pick off the lonely, the old, the orphans, the autistic guy who found it hard to socialise, the recent immigrant? Perhaps victimhood is becoming another popularity contest in our popularity-contest-obsessed times. You would hope not: the western justice system is founded on the belief that we are all equal in the eyes of the law. Not a kind of mob rule where first you have to befriend the mob to plead your case.

A review of the victim personal statement scheme, conducted by Oxford University in 2011, found that despite their “exact role and function” being ambiguous from the beginning, they were invariably implemented. Public confusion about them has reigned ever since, it said. Those victims who decide to have their say in court find the experience mostly therapeutic: and it may be of some benefit to victim and aggressor later when rehabilitation begins. But many are allowed to delude themselves that they are influencing sentencing. These expectations, as the McGintys have found, are all to often dashed. Every single study into the field has found that sentencing is not affected by the statements one way or the other. The refusal of judges to bow to huge emotional pressure makes me strangely proud.

Judge White was only speaking the truth: painful, but necessary. It is ultimately kinder to speak it — “someone should tell them”, as he put it — than continue the deception.

I believe the influence of the victim personal statement was kept deliberately ambiguous by politicians in order to give members of the public a placebo effect, lulling them into the belief they had some power when they felt powerless.

Well-intentioned maybe, but terribly wrong: wrong that the principle, if not the reality, of our justice system should be so easily sacrificed to populism; wrong to patronise. These are people, let us not forget, who are at the darkest and most vulnerable moment in their lives, summoning the courage to expose their deepest wounds in the hope that it will change something.

Judges hear the victims speak, and then put those emotions aside to do what is right. The politicians, to their shame, exploit those emotions to do what is wrong.

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