I immediately found the VOICE (Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement) announcement disturbing and distasteful, but it has taken a while for me to pin down exactly why my reaction was so negative. I think I’ve determined why I feel this idea is so fundamentally wrong: it goes against our legal traditions and our fundamental societal value of equality.
American criminal law has always stressed the crime and the criminal and not the victim. Fundamentally, we as a society believe that murder, assault, robbery – these criminal acts – are affronts to the whole society, regardless of the importance of the victim. We expect our society to safe and peaceful and criminal acts of any kind are repugnant. We do not place more legal weight on the murder of a banker than we do on the murder of a prostitute. In the eyes of the law, both are equally unacceptable, because the murder of a member of society is fundamentally unacceptable, regardless of the status of the victim or the status of the criminal. Every victim deserves equal justice.
Thus, criminal cases are prosecuted by the Government, with the Government as the plaintiff. They are not civil cases brought by one individual against another with the government as arbiter responsible for determining the existence and extent of the damages caused. The damage is obvious and the government exists to determine guilt and mete out punishment.
Meanwhile, the concept of VOICE is that some victims (US citizens) are more important than others (ordinary humans within our jurisdiction), and the crimes committed by ‘immigrants’ are more egregious than those committed by native Americans.
The victims of crime do not bear the burden of paying for prosecution; that cost is borne by society at large because we fundamentally believe that all victims have a fundamental right to equal protection under the law. The idea that we would set aside special resources for some special, privileged “class” of victims defined not by what happened to them, but rather by who did the crime against them, and who they are, this is vile and un-American. It goes against the fundamental principles of our society and is counter to our whole legal tradition. It is a move toward selective justice for some and unequal treatment. Crime is not a function of the status of the victim or the status of the criminal; it is an unacceptable behavior.
When we tamper with this fundamental, we degrade the foundations of our whole legal system.