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Before passing sentence, Saskatchewan Provincial Court Judge Inez Cardinal considered 90 victim-impact statements, most of which were read aloud in a four-day hearing last January.

I have never lost a child, and I can scarcely imagine the soul-destroying anguish of those who have. It is no surprise, and no criticism of those who have lost family members, that victim-impact statements are often harshly retributive. As such, they add powerful emotional weight to the prosecution side of the scale. They bring raw emotion to a process meant to be dispassionate.

In ancient times, people settled disputes privately. The offended party, if they had the means, took revenge against the offender in what often became an escalating exercise in mayhem. A central purpose of the justice system is to remove emotion and exercise judgment dispassionately. It is a public venture. The court acts on behalf of society, not the victim.

Photo by Saskatoon StarPhoenix/Liam Richards

Victim-impact statements undercut these principles. They bring the devices of grief porn and reality TV into the courtroom. Prosecutors often help survivors write them. MADD has a tutorial with tips on how to make them effective — that is, likely to increase sentence severity.

Some victim advocates say statements help them heal, but court is not therapy and judges are not therapists. Surely, we can find better ways to help victims.

The U.S. jurist Thurgood Marshall complained that victim-impact statements take “the jury’s attention away from the character of the defendant and the circumstances of the crime to such illicit considerations as the eloquence with which family members express their grief and the status of the victim in the community.”