It's a good idea to be suspicious of persons who charactetrize themselves as "victims." That kind of self-pity suggests a neurotic. We've got plenty of them. It's fashionable nowadays for the public, the media and the legal system to whine about the "victims" of crime. This website gets lots of emails chastening us for giving a voice to prisoners. Like so many parrots, all indoctrinated with the same party-line, the writers invariably want to know "what about the victims?" Obviously, the writers don't grasp the most elementary aspect of Pennsylvania law. Let me explain about vicitms and the criminal laws. We, that is all the people collectively, have the criminal laws. They are a very specific and exact set of laws. The criminal laws are social laws, laws which focus on the good of the whole community. What the criminal law does is to define conduct which injures society, conduct which victimizes the whole community. Where someone violates a criminal law, the whole society is harmed. The whole society, in the form of the government, takes the suspect to court. The trial has nothing to do with the injury done to any individual. It's about the injury done to the fabric of the community. The government does not (or should not) extract a punishment for any injury done to an individual "victim." It extracts punishment for the injury done to the community as a whole. Easy, right? So, what about the indivdiual vicitms of a crime? Even though the criminal law is designed to ignore individual "victims," there's a whole branch of law dedicated exclusively to "victims," the civil law. Whenever anyone is injured, by a crime or by any act which isn't a crime (a so-called "tort"), the vicitm can take the defendant to court to recover damages for the injury. The victim extracts her or his retribution with the civil law, not the criminal law. It's a fundamental legal error to expect the criinal law to do what the civil law is supposed to do. Where whiners bawl about the "victims" of crime, they should be reminded that we are all vicitmized by crime, the whole society is harmed. If some individual "victim" has a beef, she should turn to the civil law.