Victim Rights and Restitution

History of Victim Rights

A crime victim can be defined both as a person whom a criminal offender has acted upon and as an actor in the criminal justice process. As Dupont-Morales states, “Individuals are not victims until a statute defines them as such” (2001: 373). Victims have only the rights in the criminal justice process that laws provide them. The dilemma in the United States is that the Bill of Rights formally established due process rights for criminal defendants over 200 years ago, whereas American law only recently began recognizing victims' rights.

Before there were formal law enforcement and judicial processes, early tribal social norms supported victims taking an active role in determining the fate of those who victimized them, even to the point of exacting revenge on the criminal and making the criminal's family support the victim or his or her survivors. The victim continued to be the focal point of the criminal justice system in ancient civilizations. During the time of the Old Testament, convicted criminals were customarily [Page 1666]required to compensate their victims for their losses, what was later called restitution.

However, English law in the late tenth century recognized that crimes were acts against society and altered the criminal justice process to focus on that fact rather than on the victim's personal dispute with the criminal, which was best served by the civil law process. Furthermore, as the state, representing society, replaced the victim as the principal party in prosecuting criminals, restitution paid to crime victims was replaced with fines paid to the government. These fundamental changes in the legal status of victims also served as a functioned in the common law of the American colonists, which would later evolve into the law of the United States.