Victims' rights

Victims' rights are legal rights afforded to victims of crime. These include the right to restitution, the right not to be excluded from criminal justice proceedings, and the right to speak at criminal justice proceedings.

The Crime Victims' Rights Movement in the United States is founded on the idea that, during the late modern period (1800-1970), the American justice system strayed too far from its victim-centric origins. Since the 1970s, the movement has worked to give victims a more meaningful role in criminal proceedings, aiming at the inclusion of "the individual victim as a legally recognized participant with rights, interests, and voice."

During the colonial and revolutionary periods, the United States criminal justice system was "victim-centric," in that crimes were often investigated and prosecuted by individual victims. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, however, the focus shifted so that crime was seen primarily as a "social harm." The criminal justice system came to be seen as a tool for remedying this social harm, rather than an avenue for redress of personal harm, and the role of the victim in criminal proceedings was drastically reduced.

The modern Crime Victims' Rights Movement began in the 1970s. It began, in part, as a response to the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court Decision in Linda R.S. v. Richard D. (410 U.S. 614). In Linda R.S., the Court ruled that the complainant did not have the legal standing to keep the prosecutors' office from discriminately applying a statute criminalizing non-payment of child support. In dicta, the court articulated the then-prevailing view that a crime victim cannot compel a criminal prosecution because "a private citizen lacks a judicially cognizable interest in the prosecution or non-prosecution of another." This ruling served as a high-water mark in the shift away from the victim-centric approach to criminal justice, making it clear that victims in the 1970s had "no formal legal status beyond that of a witness or piece of evidence."

If the Linda R.S. Ruling was a clear representation of the problem of victim exclusion, it also hinted at a solution to the problem. The Court stated that Congress could "enact statutes creating victims' rights, the invasion of which creates standing, even though no injury would exist without the statute." With this statement, the Court provided a legal foundation for victims' rights legislation.

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