Reverberations of the Victim's "Voice": Victim Impact Statements and the Cultural Project of Punishment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article will argue that current debate on victim’s participation in criminal sentencing process ignores how complexity of a victim narrative effectively conveys social experience of harm, without which criminal justice system loses its legitimacy as a penal authority. In other words, we cannot only consider the victim, the defendant, and the state as three separate entities vying for narrative control over accounts of in determining punishment. Rather, stories of victims and defendants already circulate through society outside of courtroom and function of the state in trial context is to vindicate interests of this society. Notions about criminal harm enter culture through experiences of individuals, as well as through political rhetoric and media representations, and, once there, shape social norms about assignment of blame. Therefore, if sentencing process cannot accommodate stories of actual to individual victims it runs risk of either coming to be viewed as illegitimate to a society guided by these norms or allowing free reign for generic representations of criminal produced by political and media actors to take place of individuated victim accounts in mind of a fact-finder.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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".