• How are statements of this kind to be verified? You assert that verbalization of traumatic events is psychologically liberating, but you don't tell us how you know. You don't explain how the particular environment of the courtroom produces or inhibits this "liberating" experience, and you don't explain how cross-examination improves that sense. Our intuitions don't match, and mere assertion is hardly going to resolve the issue.

• I don't think you can take this position by assertion, either. The trial works pretty hard to avoid allowing anyone, victim included, to identify it as a mechanism for private revenge. Delay, formalization, and other factors eliminate, deliberately, the idea of "vengeance." Even contemporary "victims' rights" advocates speak in terms of "closure" rather than revenge.

• This is a fallacy. The paragraph offers formalization and length as indications that fact-finding is not the purpose of trial (this is mere assertion, too, rather than argument, but let that pass). Proving that B is not A is never probative that B is C, which you then go on to declare.

Instead, trials have been structured to be quite public affairs, characterized by media frenzy surrounding the victim, the offender, and often their respective family members. Rather than promoting truth, publicity and elaboration do more to serve the purpose of helping victims overcome a tragedy by garnering much-needed public support.

• "Media frenzy" is an attribute of almost no criminal trials. You are now arguing concerning purpose by citing an excessively marginal property of exceptional instances.

• Indeed, and victim-impact statements are a late-20th century institution related to the situation of jury sentencing which (outside Texas) is an aberration of the capital punishment system. "Victim impact statements" have no bearing on liability, and therefore had no place in traditional criminal trials. The requirement that juries impose death sentences caused states that had never involved juries in sentencing to do so, which led advocates for victims to join with prosecutors in seeking the admission of evidence that usually goes to whiteness, wealth, and other "value" claims concerning the worthiness of the dead and the comparative worthlessness of the defendant. Once can, I agree offer these statements as a sign that when the trial is used to sentence, to that extent the trial is about revenge, which is why the Supreme Court first outlawed victim impact statements, before the Court was repacked to allow them. But doesn't that just highlight how different a "sentencing trial" is from the traditional procedure with which sentencing had nothing to do?

It is important to note that the emotional and psychological harm that a victim suffers is almost always considered in a judge or jury’s deliberation, whether or not victim-impact statements are actually used. Judges and juries are human, and humans tend to have a remarkable capacity to empathize with one another. Thus, judges and juries always implicitly consider the emotional pain of the victim. In this way, the inherent human and subjective nature of the criminal trial acts as an indirect way in which emotion and vengeance is transformed into a permanent judgment. Victim-impact statements are just the more overt version of what has always taken place.

• You seem to think that juries always ignore their instructions to concern themselves with the evidence to the exclusion of emotions and non-evidentiary statements. This is, as usual, asserted without more. It's not how juries work in my experience, and I'm not sure why you believe it's true. What happened to the victim may be relevant if the issue is whether a crime occurred, but the usual subject of the criminal trial is not whether a crime occurred but whether the defendant committed it, and for that purpose the nature of the victim's loss or suffering is utterly irrelevant but potentially prejudicial. In my experience, juries are pretty good at listening to and following an instruction to disregard what doesn't matter.

• This takes us from assertion about function to normative statement of purpose, and I must admit I find the conclusion a little shocking in view of the argument. Given that the defendant is presumed innocent (which you haven't mentioned and don't seem actually to believe), recommendation to move away from a state deemed "objective and fair" to one that "serves the emotional needs of the victim" appears to condone injustice to the innocent as long as some injured party therefore feels better. When one considers that this "enough about fairness" perspective has itself been rested on a substrate of assertions rather than proof, or even evidence, the relation between the idea expressed and the mode of expressing it adds to one's discomfort.