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Originally Posted by Winsor_Pilates
But you just did make a slippery slope argument. Victim impact and victim healing are already factors in sentencing and the justice system. There's no reason for this to lead to the crazy items at the end of your quote.
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Oh come on now, you know that was just a dumb joke at the end of that post.
But still, I don't know that victim impact statements are factors in sentencing. Maybe they are. My understanding of victim impact statements is that they are a forum for victims to say their piece and to let the judge and jury to hear about what the crime has done to them. Maybe it does play a role in sentencing. But the sentence still has to follow the rules and far as I know, "it'll make the victim feel better if I condemn this guy to death" isn't, I hope, a consideration. I guess it probably is though.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Winsor_Pilates
There's a middle ground between victim's wants not being a factor, and victims wants being an extreme factor. Most things in life fall in middle grounds like this and it doesn't mean we have to fear the dreaded slippery slope.
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Yeah, that's fair enough, if the accused is actually guilty.
To veer slightly off course here... say one of my kids gets snatched and killed by some nut. I know I could put together a compelling victim impact statement when the time comes. The evidence is all presented, I say my piece, the killer is found guilty and executed and it all works out. A few years later it comes out that we were all wrong. Somebody else did it. Now how do I feel about that?
I've got a few reasons to be against capital punishment, but the easiest one is that the government makes a lot of mistakes. How many of us would say that our government does something efficiently or properly even 75% of the time?
We're all guilty when an innocent person gets murdered by the government with our consent.