Victims' Rights

Barry Boss has an excellent article about why the current victims' rights movement is bad for our justice system. Nobody would say that complaining witnesses should be treated poorly, but such a focus upon the rights of 'victims' is having several pernicious effects upon our criminal justice system. For one, it skews the system away from justice and toward revenge or retribution. Secondly, it takes control of a case out of the hands of the prosecutors and puts it into the hands of the complaining witnesses. Third, it greatly erodes the presumption of innocence because we start with the idea that the defendant has indeed committed a crime since these people are 'victims'. Lastly, it also undermines a defendant's right to cross-examination since attempts to question credibility are not viewed as the rightful testing of an accused's story, but rather 'victim bashing'. No, it's not victim bashing. Its testing evidence because someone's more important rights, life and liberty, are at stake.

To give an idea of some of the absurd results that can occur with this victim rights fetish, consider a somewhat recent (within the last couple of years) case from Anchorage. The client was arrested for possession, not distribution or manufacture, of child pornography. Some of the images involved were known child pornography*, US Dept. of Justice having determined that the images were created in the early to mid 90s in eastern Europe. The prosecution and defense reached a bail stipulation that would have allowed for the defendant's release from custody before trial since he was, after all, presumed innocent and entitled to bail under the constitutions of Alaska and United States. Alaska victim rights' law requires that the prosecution contact the 'victims' of a crime. As you might imagine, there was no way for the prosecution to determine the identify of the girls in the images, let alone find out how to contact them. Along comes the District Court Judge who refuses to let the guy out of jail because the prosecution had not contacted the victims. Even the prosecution thought that this finding was unreasonable. So, the case had to be postponed and set before a different judge, one who possessed a more enlightened understanding of the law.

*Child pornography is generally defined as actual images of persons under a certain age. Given Photoshop and other imaging technology, it is possible to take a legal photograph of adults engaged in sexual activity and change it to appear to be an underage person. One element that must be proven in a child pornography prosecution is that the images are indeed child pornography and not altered ("morphed" as its generally known) images. US DOJ and some other organizations have, through prosecutions, been able to determine how certain images were made. Images that are indeed actual depictions of underage persons are recorded so that in future prosecutions, the prosecution can rely upon previous court findings regarding those images.

Comments

[operator101]

ahhh.... Anchorage district court bail hearings....