Share Your Grief but Not Your Anger: Victims and the Expression of Emotion in Criminal Justice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction This chapter focuses on the growing trend towards using the criminal justice system as a venue for the expression of emotion by crime victims and their families. In the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, crime victims and their families are being given the opportunity to address the court, to confront the defendant and to weigh in on how the case is being conducted. These innovations pose difficult questions for adversary systems, in which the trial has long been viewed as a two-way battle between the government and the accused. In order to define and regulate the increasingly powerful role of the victim, it is first necessary to determine what goals the victim's participation is meant to achieve. The legal context places the questions of this volume in sharp relief. Choices about who is permitted to express emotion in particular venues, and about what emotions may be expressed, have concrete consequences. In the criminal justice system, for example, the decision to afford victims a venue for expression has been linked to increased severity of sentence and increased likelihood of a death sentence. Ideally, a choice with such weighty consequences would be based on a considered judgement that permitting such expression will advance legitimate goals. Yet although the emotions of crime victims, and of murder victims’ family members (hereinafter survivors), have been afforded an increasingly powerful role in the criminal justice system in the past several decades, the justifications offered for that increased role have been poorly articulated and inconsistent. Without a coherent understanding of what role the communication of victim emotion is meant to serve, it is difficult to determine what form the communication ought to take, and what limits should be placed on the communication. It is also difficult to determine, as an empirical matter, whether the communication is serving any legitimate purpose in practice, or whether it is in fact interfering with important criminal justice goals. In the adversary system, the traditional view is that by representing the state, the prosecution adequately represents the interests of victims as well. Recently victims have been given increasing participation rights, but the rationale for providing that access has not been well articulated.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".