Victim Impact Statement

A victim impact statement is a written or oral statement made as part of the judicial legal process, which allows a victim of crime the opportunity to speak during the sentencing of their attacker or at subsequent parole hearings. In some instances videotaped statements are permitted.

Read more about Victim Impact Statement:  Overview, United States, Australia, Finland

Famous quotes containing the words victim, impact and/or statement:

    each new victim treads unfalteringly
    The never altered circuit of his fate,
    Bringing twelve peers as witness
    Both to his starry rise and starry fall.
    Robert Graves (1895–1985)

    One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.
    Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)

    The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true.
    Nicholson Baker (b. 1957)