Why victims should NOT have a voice

I have held on to this post for a few days, as it seemed a bit tasteless to plunge in straightway.

Last week at the Old Bailey a statement by Adèle Eastman, Tom Ap Rhys Price’s fiancée, was read out in open court, after his killers had been found guilty but before they had been sentenced. Ap Rhys Price had got a First in Classics in my Faculty at Cambridge a decade ago and then become a lawyer. His killing has seemed to many people peculiarly and horribly senseless.

The public reaction of his family has surpassed belief in its dignity. Together with his legal firm they have set up a trust in his memory to provide educational facilities for the disadvantaged – as, in one way or another, his killers certainly were. And, far from squealing for the noose, they decried the widespread carrying of knives. (Donations to the trust can be made online.)

But under a pilot scheme now running in England (influenced in part by practice in the United States), the bereaved were allowed to make their own courtroom statement about the impact that the crime had had on their lives.

I am sure that, had I been in Adèle Eastman’s position, I would have done exactly what she did. I am also sure that this innovation is a very bad idea.

Her statement was about as good anyone could do in the circumstances: a moving combination of  rhetorical sophistication and those clichés that are the only way of express such raw emotions. It was reprinted widely in tabloids and broadsheets, often with photographs of the couple (a mawkish bit of sentiment that I am afraid I have repeated at the top of this post).

The main reason for my rather unfashionable dislike of all this is the different classes of victim it tends to create. On the one hand, there are those who leave behind them grieving lovers or mothers (Elizabeth Davidson’s statement about her daughter killed by a dangerous driver was the last such to hit the headlines) – bereaved women, who fit with a popular, even comfortable, view of tragedy and have the eloquence to write or speak as powerfully as the situation allows.

Then, on the other, there are those who leave behind those who are decidedly unglamorous in their grief: the frail elderly, the inarticulate, the criminals, the drug-takers – and those who, even with the help of a state-provided lawyer, cannot begin to encapsulate the impact of their loss. And of course there are those whose death is not mourned at all.

Judges are supposed to take account of the impact of the crime on the victim in passing sentence. But this is only one factor among many, and they are I am sure far too hard-headed to be swayed by any such popular notions of victim-hood. But all the same, in the press reporting of these cases, there is an underlying implication (as others have dared to point out) that the killing of some people deserves heavier punishment than of others – or even that the more upset the victim’s family are (or can show themselves to be), the longer the sentence that should be meted out.

The ancient world battled with these kinds of issues too. Certainly, the Roman courtroom of the first century BC saw more than its fair share of grieving wives and children paraded in front of the jury.  But I was always taught that one of the greatest achievements of Athenian and Roman law was the way that it progressively took the power away from the individual victim – and gave it instead to a (hopefully) dispassionate state judicial process.

We seem now to be travelling in the opposite direction

Comments

[James]

One of the problems of allowing impact statements in court is that it perpetuates the feelings of victimhood and confers on those who have already suffered loss an additional burden of being a state-sanctioned "victim" in their minds and in the minds of others. This frame of mind is rarely good. As others have mentioned, it also undercuts the role of the state and of society in negating, or at least mitigating, feelings of hostility between individuals and between the involved families.

[Ray Lopez]

Hey Mary Beard--I just bought your book on the Parthanon and intend to read it someday! Bravo, well done. Can you read ancient Greek? I can read modern Greek but ancient is a bit hard (different words used--for example, dog in ancient GR is an obscure kuwv ('hunter'), still used today but 'skilos' is more modern).

As for this topic, please be advised that you are mixing apples and oranges somewhat: the Romans invented what is known as the "Continental" system of justice, where a judge not the jury decides everything (according to logic), whereas the English invented the so-called "Common Law" system (adopted by America) which is more flexible and allows a jury trial (i.e. allows emotions). So the 'victim impact statement' is simply an extension of English Common law. In Europe (ie France) they would be less willing to let such stuff in.

RL

[Neil Murphy]

When someone loses a loved one in those circumstances they have to heal. part of that process is being allowed to express themselves. Additionally, justice has to be seen to be done, people have to believe it is being done. I don't know whether it will improve things or not, but the victoms seems to like it, and they are a tad more important than the perpetrators.

[Mark Lambert]

Although the relatives of the victim are entitled to express their views, the courtroom is not an appropriate place to do it since it adds no value to the legal process.

The definition of victim is becoming blurred. If we allow the punishment to take into account the effects on 'indirect' victims (as victim statements seem to imply) then the punishments must, by definition, become harsher if we assume that retribution is one of the purposes of punishment. But then we must allow the relatives of the guilty (more 'indirect victims') to also issue their own statements and we end up in a never-ending circle where we could all, ultimately, end up being classified as victims.

So I agree with Mary and I hope that victim statements are kept out of the courtroom. The legal process may be impersonal but, by remaining so, maintains its impartiality.

[Red dwarf]

Hear hear -- at last some sense on this. Keep on fighting the fight!

[Tom Rawlinson]

Well said, Mary Beard.

One thousand years ago, along with inventing the jury, our ancestors made crime an offense against the person of Her Majesty. It ceased to be any business of the victim.

The new system had another advantage, perhaps even greater than the benefit to the judicial system. It enabled the recovery/healing of the victims to start sooner, and almost certainly be quicker and more complete.

I speak as the victim of a family tragedy. The scars of that loss are permanent, but I'm convinced that spitting hatred at the driver would have delayed my/our recovery.

[Ian Thorpe]

You are right all round. The practice of encouraging victim statements will create classes of victim and Adele Eadtman's statement was exemplary.

But Adele is well educated and articulate and emotionally equipped to weild weapons such as restraint, dignity and compassion than most people. Compare her words to the (very understandable) outpourings of grief and anger we hear from some connections of murder victims.
Victim Statements are just another example of how much liberal America is in thrall to its psychologists. People are goaded to public displays of emotion when stoicism is called for.
"Letting it out" too often leaves behind an open, festering wound in my experience.

[David Kirwan]

Nearer home, I was taught at school (and I am sure I have seen it in print since then) that one of the great achievements of the Anglo-Saxon kings was to replace the highly personal blood feud that could be carried on through generations between the families of victim and murderer by the impersonal process of the King's Peace. It seems to me that by allowing it even to appear that the voice of the survivors can influence the sentence then we risk returning, if not to the era of the blood feud, that at least to the stage where a murdered man's wergild (the monetary compensation offered to the family) depended on his rank and race. I agree with Mary. Do we really want to discard what up till now has been judged one of the great advances in the administration of justice?

[postblogger]

I'm in a bit of a rush, so will keep this short (and probably unpleasant)...

My knowledge of the English legal system deserved to be treated with contempt, but it's always been my understanding that it DOES punish the killing of some people (policemen, say) more heavily than the killing of others (Iraqi civilians, say).

However, while I agree with the UK legal system that some people's lives ARE worth more than others, I disagree with its assumption that you can tell exactly WHOSE lives until tens, if not hundreds, of years, after the people themselves have died. To mangle one Classical quotation and one modern anecdote, we shouldn't call anybody worthwhile until they're dead, and should work on the same sort of timescale as Mao Tse-Tung(*) did when passing judgement on the consequences of the French Revolution.

But I'm in complete agreement with you that, however a person's worth is judged, the eloquence of friends shouldn't be included.

(* He was supposed to have said 'It's too early to tell', although the anecdote is told about other people as well.)