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responsiveness to the perspective of crime victims and their families. The problem was that
not all crime victims received the same treatment.
Fifty years ago, the prevailing concept in the American criminal justice system was that
everyone in the community is the victim when an offender commits a violent crime. The
party that prosecutes a criminal defendant is called the “State” or the “People” or the
“Commonwealth” because when someone is murdered, raped, robbed, or assaulted, it is an
offense against all of us. In the early 1980 s, though, states started involving individual crime
victims in the trial process and began “personalizing” crime victims in their presentation of
cases. Some states authorized the family members of the victim to sit at the prosecutor’s table
during trial. Thirty-six states enacted laws that gave victims specific rights to participate in
the trial process or to make victim impact statements. In many places, prosecutors started
introducing themselves as the lawyer representing a particular victim, rather than as a
representative of the civic authorities.
In death penalty cases, the U.S. Supreme Court said in 1987 that introducing evidence
about the status, character, reputation, or family of a homicide victim was unconstitutional.
The prevailing idea for decades had been that “all victims are equal”—that is, the murder of a
four-year-old child of a wealthy parent is no more serious an offense than the murder of a
child whose parent is in prison or even than the murder of the parent in prison. The Court
prohibited jurors from hearing “victim impact” statements because they were too
inflammatory and introduced arbitrariness into the capital sentencing process. Many critics
argued that such evidence would ultimately disempower poor victims, victims who were
racial minorities, and family members who didn’t have the resources to advocate for their
deceased loved ones. The Court agreed, striking down this kind of evidence in Booth v.
Maryland.
The Court’s decision was widely criticized by prosecutors and some politicians, and it
seemed to energize the victims’ rights movement. Less than three years later, the Court
reversed itself in Payne v. Tennessee and upheld the rights of states to present evidence about
the character of the victim in a capital sentencing trial.
With the Supreme Court now giving its constitutional blessing to a more visible and
protected role for individual victims in the criminal trial process, changes in the American
criminal justice process accelerated. Millions of state and federal dollars were authorized to
create advocacy groups for crime victims in each state. States found countless ways for
individual victims in particular crimes to become decision makers and participants. Victims’
advocates were added to parole boards, and in most states they were given a formal role in
state and local prosecutors’ offices. Victim services and outreach became critical components
of the prosecutorial function. Some states made executions more accommodating of victims
by increasing the number of people from the victim’s family who could watch the execution.
State legislatures enacted harsh new punishments for crimes, naming statutes after
particular victims. Megan’s Law, for example, which broadened state power to create sex
offender registries, was named after Megan Kanka, a seven-year-old girl who was raped and
murdered by a man who had previously been convicted of child molestation. Instead of a
faceless state or community, crime victims were featured at trial, and criminal cases took on
the dynamics of a traditional civil trial, pitting the family of the victim against the offender.
Press coverage hyped the personal nature of the conflict between the offender and specific