Coming next month to a courtroom near you: a bewildered young man, freshly convicted, trembles in the dock while awaiting his fate. But just before sentencing, a weeping widow stands, turns welling blue eyes to the bench and beseeches His Honour: ‘I cannot forgive him for his part in my husband’s death. My life is ruined. I beg you to punish him to the maximum.’ Murmurs of assent are shushed in the public gallery. ‘Well,’ says the judge, ‘I had planned leniency, in light of the coercion from older bullies and his mental age of six. However, since you ask so nicely — Officer! Take him down and throw away the darned key!’ And the gallery erupts in applause.
All right… hands up to a smidge of exaggeration. But only a smidge. An adjustment to court procedure, proudly announced last week by the policing and victims minister Damian Green, is designed not only actively to include victims of crime in a trial but, he hopes, in some cases to ensure that their inclusion will lead to tougher sentences. Victim support groups are naturally as cock-a-hoop as Green is pleased with himself; neither appears to have noticed that, by plonking the most fraught of emotion where emotion has no useful place, this move undermines a judicial system that has stood us in pretty good stead for centuries.
The change, under the new Victims’ Code, is that between guilty verdict and sentence the victim of a crime — or, in cases of murder or manslaughter, the relatives of the victim — will have the right to read aloud a self-penned ‘victim impact statement’ to ram home the effect that the crime has had upon them.
The victim impact statement is not new; in the West it originated in 1982, in touchy-feely California (you’d guessed that already, hadn’t you?) and it was imported to England and Wales in 2001.
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