Over the last twenty years, the ‘victim’s rights’ movement has fueled major changes in criminal law. Oregon victim’s-rights law permits a victim to attend judicial proceedings and to obtain information about the process. Further, as a practical matter, the prosecutor will typically consult with the victim about plea-bargaining, at least if the victim wants to be consulted. There’s a listing of the major Oregon victim’s-rights laws at http://law.lclark.edu/live/files/4971-oregon.
The push for victim’s rights law came from the right-hand side of the political spectrum, which tends to favor more severe punishments, and sometimes victim’s rights look to me like a thinly-disguised argument in favor of harsh criminal penalties; Ballot Measure 11, which imposes mandatory minimum sentences, was sponsored by “Crime Victims United,” which is a tough-on-crime political advocacy group.
Because of the connection between victim’s rights and tough-on-crime advocacy, the victim has a lot more of a right to seek retribution than to seek lenience. It is easy for the victim to persuade the court to order the defendant to move out of their shared apartment, impose restitution for parking expenses during trial, or forfeit bail for back child support. It is much harder for the victim to persuade the court, or the prosecutor, to drop the charges, offer a favorable plea bargain, or sentence the defendant to probation for an offense that typically carries a prison term.
I have a client, Mike, who impregnated his then-seventeen-year-old girlfriend, Anne. Anne was a willing participant, but, because she’s below the age of consent (18 in Oregon) she technically did not consent. Mike’s an adult, so he had committed a crime: Sexual Abuse in the Third Degree and Contributing to the Sexual Delinquency of a Minor, among others.
Anne has since turned eighteen and had the baby, and they want to get married. It wasn’t all that long ago that it was a good thing when a couple wanted to marry after having a baby, but with the newfound importance of victim’s rights, they aren’t allowed to marry or even to exchange pictures of the baby. Anne is technically the ‘victim’ Miket’s crime, for which he is still on probation. So the system is protecting Anne from Mike by preventing Mike from having any contact with her. That means that a new eighteen-year-old mother is prevented from having her baby’s father’s assistance in raising the baby.
If Anne wanted for Mike to go to prison for years, at a minimum both the DA and the judge would listen respectfully when she said so, and, in practice, that would probably have increased Mike’s sentence. But now that she wants to marry him, she’s out of luck. We had a hearing, and the judge refused to permit them to have contact. So ‘victim’s rights’ is protecting Anne from the man she wants to marry, and forcing her to raise an infant as a single mother.
