Supreme Court Allows Victim Impact Videos In Murder Cases
This is good news.
When some animal, for his own selfish reasons, tears a loved one away from a family forever the immediate victim isn’t the only one affected. The murder of a parent of brother or sister or…..child has a horrendous impact on families.
Appeals were filed with the Supreme Court over the use of “impact videos” because the defense argued that a jury would be swayed emotionally by them. Seeing a victim alive before some animal rips their lives away and out of the lives of their families gives a jury a perspective that defense attorneys didn’t want them to have.
The L.A. Times reports on this but simply cannot help itself once more when it comes to putting just a bit of a liberal twist to the story.
Check out the opening sentence of their report:
Reporting from Washington — Over the objection of three justices, the Supreme Court on Monday turned down appeals from two Los Angeles murderers who said it was unfair that videotapes of the victims’ lives were played for jurors before they decided the killers should die.
Over the objections of three justices. Heh. That’s just to let you know there was dissent. Note that they don’t mention how many voted to uphold the use of the videos. Had this been a ruling for gun control or stengthening abortion rights they would have trumpeted in big bold headlines what a resounding victory it was. Amazing.
Anyway, the defense argument was this:
Defense lawyers had argued that this “cinematic evidence . . . designed to play on the jury’s emotions” should be excluded from a sentencing hearing in a capital case.
There is more in the article, but what it boils down to is that they argued that it’s just not fair to show how those families feel and how they remember their loved ones.
Well, get this….the horror and deep grief that those families had to go through after some animal took someone from them wasn’t fair either, was it?
So….the animals (there’s that word again but it’s just so….appropriate) who raped and killed a young woman and who murdered an elderly couple will die. Tough. I have no problems with that. Those creatures should have thought of that before they murdered those folks and tore holes in those families that can never be filled.
And now the families can have their say on how it impacted them in court.
One for the good guys.
