The Role of the Victim at Sentencing

Abstract

Guidance from courts of appeal is needed with respect to the role of victim and community impact statements in sentencing. VIS and CIS forms have improved clarity and uniformity across provinces, but questions remain in regard to the rationales of the two kinds of impact statements, the relevance of ancillary harm, the forms of delivery, the rationales behind using victim opinions as mitigating evidence, as well as gauging harm. Clarifying the ways in which harm is understood for the purposes of sentencing would address some of the questions raised by the VIS and CIS regimes. Judges have relied on some types of inferences to make sense of the victim impact statement and its relationship with harm. For instance, some judges have interpreted post-offence behaviour, such as forgiveness, as evidence of lesser harm. Furthermore, the notion of harm has been expanded in the context of community impact statements to include harms suffered by the wider community. The legislative frameworks around victim and community impact statements would gain from a more thorough reflection on conceptions of harm in sentencing.

Keywords: victims, communities, impact, statement, sentencing