Friday, November 01, 2013
Cruel Deception
I agree with this piece on the Spiked site. The tabloid-driven sentimental slush about victims was right up the street of the Blair government. Cruelly, victims get to express their pain (providing, by the way, some nice sexy headlines) while the judge is specifically forbidden to adjust his sentence as a result.
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Or her sentence.
ReplyDeleteKate Caveat (in full agreement with the point you make though).
Being picky it's not the sentence of the judge, male or female, who determines and announces it, but the sentence of the court. It's thus best described as "the sentence".
DeleteFair point! A good gender neutral formulation.
DeleteKate (without any caveats!)
For the purposes of this blog, the male shall embrace the female, as the old saying goes.
DeleteSomeone in the E.U. is being dumb beyond permission. This drivel about victims role in criminal proceedings is all E.U. stuff. Seems eurocrats are not up to ask themselves a few very basic questions. Like : Why do we prosecute crimes at all, if not for victims' sake? And why do we nonetheless entrust the task of prosecuting crime to specially appointed public officials, instead of simply seeing that victims are funded to pay for private prosecution?
ReplyDeleteThe UK is in the EU, and the first two Directors-General of the Justice and Home Affairs department in the European Commission were British. British ministers have been fully party to all the relevant discussions, and have helped shape everything that has come out of Brussels (the Tampere roadmap was drawn up by ministers from all member states, which include Italy, by the way!). One of the Tampere 'milestones' (no 32 if you're interested) that were defined back in October 1999 as being necessary to create "A Genuine European Area of Justice" read as follows: "[M]inimum standards should be drawn up on the protection of the victims of crime, in particular on crime victims' access to justice and on their rights to compensation for damages, including legal costs. In addition, national programmes should be set up to finance measures, public and non-governmental, for assistance to and protection of victims." What is there not to like in that? The public reading of victim impact statements is one of those national measures, decided upon by HMG, not by Brussels.
ReplyDeleteWe do need to get away from this notion that policy in this area is dictated by Eurocrats in Brussels. The agenda is set by Ministers and by the European Parliament, and the decisions are taken by them, not by "Brussels". It's too easy to blame Brussels for all this. We need to hold our Ministers and MEPs to better account (something on the lines of the Danish model would be really interesting!), but that is just as true domestically as in the context of EU affairs.
As regards measures to *really* help victims, what I personally would like to see is the currently misrepresented and misapplied Victim Surcharge (sic) genuinely being used to create a properly funded Compensation Scheme to enable victims to be paid the sums ordered in compensation by the courts, rather than being diverted to pay for all sorts of other worthy but indirect measures to prop up the struggling court service. For the victims of crime to have the sporadic "drip, drip" reminder of what they endured come through in £5 instalments every now and then must be horrible.
From Me 2 EU
Funnily enough I am in correspondence with the Judicial College to try to find out why it is called 'Victim' surcharge at all. I started by looking at the legislation where the word victim doesn't appear, not once.
DeleteTheir reply was that the pronouncement was worded to ensure that the lowest common denominator understood it. I take that to mean the defendant although, having seen some CPS prosecutors of late, I’m not even sure about that any more.
They wanted to show that the surcharge goes to benefit victims. I have written back to ask where it was decided that the money would be used to help victims, when it was not in the legislation that it should be used for that purpose, and I await a reply. I would have thought it more likely it was someone in the ministry who thought it a good wheeze to raise more money, some of which may or may not eventually get to some victims.
I understand that some court chairman are now only referring to it as a surcharge and have dropped the word victim.
I also await a reply to my query under the Freedom of Information Act to establish just how much does go to victims. Anyone want to put a bet on it being less than 50%, always assuming the computer system can now actually record it. When it was a flat rate of £15 some systems couldn’t handle it so, if those systems were changed, would those changes have allowed for the new variable rates? I wouldn’t put money on that either.
Some of us have never included the word "victim" when referring to the surcharge.
DeleteActually we do it for the good of society, if it were solely for the victim's sake we would have differential outcomes dependent on the moral worth of the victim. A crime against a known offender would be seen as less serious than a crime against a villain if that were not the case.
ReplyDeleteAnd it is not EU stuff. It is the basis of justice systems in all sociological and anthropological work - a system separated from the victim being seen as more impartial and therefore more advances.
Luke Gittos of Spiked has fallen into a trap of his own making in confusing trials with sentencing. The Victim Impact Statement under the new Victim Code will not be read out in court until before sentencing, not before or during the trial, so there is no way it can influence a jury (or a bench of magistrates). If the defendant is found not guilty, it will never be heard.
ReplyDeleteIn which case, what is achieved by having the victim read out their statement in court, since it is not allowed to affect the appropriate sentence, instead of on the steps of the courthouse to the assembled press, or in a civil court where it would be relevant to any consideration of compensation by the perpetrator to the victim or his or her family? It seems to be just one more example of pandering to a vengeful public with votes at the next election in mind, something which Theresa May and Chris Grayling seem to have elevated to an art form.
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