All victims are equal

All victims are equal is the ideal that a homicide’s seriousness should not depend on the victim’s status, family, or public visibility. In the book, the phrase marks a conflict within American criminal justice: the law has sometimes tried to keep jurors from ranking victims, while the institutions that investigate and prosecute crimes have repeatedly shown that some victims and families receive far less attention than others.

The principle and its legal history

For decades, the prevailing principle in capital cases was that one victim’s life could not count for more than another’s because of wealth, family circumstances, or social standing. In 1987, the Supreme Court of the United States applied that principle to victim-impact evidence, ruling in Booth v. Maryland that jurors in death-penalty cases could not hear evidence about a homicide victim’s status, character, reputation, or family. Such material, the Court concluded, risked inflaming jurors and introducing arbitrariness into capital sentencing.

The ruling sought to prevent a grieving family’s ability to present its loss from becoming a measure of how harshly a defendant would be punished. Critics, however, argued that excluding victim-impact statements could also disadvantage poor and minority families, whose deceased relatives might otherwise receive little recognition. The debate therefore concerned more than whether a victim’s life mattered: it concerned who could make that loss visible in court, and whose account would be heard.

The legal principle changed quickly. Prosecutors and politicians criticized Booth v. Maryland, and the decision energized the victims’ rights movement. Less than three years later, in Payne v. Tennessee, the Court reversed course and upheld states’ authority to present evidence about a victim’s character at capital sentencing. The shift gave individual victims and families a more formal place in criminal proceedings, but it did not ensure equal treatment among them.

Recognition expands, but not equally

From the early 1980s onward, states increasingly involved victims in trials. Thirty-six states enacted laws giving victims specific rights to participate or make victim-impact statements; some allowed relatives to sit at the prosecutor’s table. Prosecutors in many places began presenting themselves as lawyers for particular victims rather than simply as representatives of the state. Victim advocates also entered parole boards and prosecutors’ offices, and some states expanded the number of a victim’s relatives permitted to witness an execution.

This growing visibility could personalize a case around the relationship between a victim’s family and the accused. It could also give a victim’s relatives a role in conversations about plea bargains and punishment. But the book stresses that these opportunities were uneven: formal rights did not mean that every family was contacted, supported, or included in consequential decisions. Greater recognition for some could coexist with the neglect of others.

The unequal weight of race and class

The gap between the ideal and practice is stark in the book’s account of capital punishment. The study presented in McCleskey v. Kemp found that in Georgia defendants were eleven times more likely to receive the death penalty if their victim was white rather than Black. Studies in other states replicated the pattern. In Alabama, although Black people made up 65 percent of homicide victims, nearly 80 percent of people on death row had been convicted of crimes against white victims; cases pairing a Black defendant with a white victim carried an even greater likelihood of a death sentence. These figures show how the identity of the victim could shape the punishment imposed on the accused, even as the formal ideal held that victims were equal.

The book also traces the racial history behind that disparity. After Reconstruction collapsed, racial hierarchy and segregation were enforced through restrictive laws and the policing of intimate relationships between Black men and white women. Anti-miscegenation statutes helped sustain a social order in which white womanhood was treated as a particular object of protection, while Black people’s rights and safety remained insecure. This history gives the later distinctions in whose victimization commands attention a longer institutional context.

The imbalance appears not only in sentencing statistics but in everyday decisions about whose testimony and concerns count. When Black residents told Sheriff Tom Tate that Walter McMillian was the wrong man, Tate had not investigated McMillian’s background or whereabouts on the day of Ronda Morrison’s murder. He nevertheless accepted Ralph Myers’s accusations. McMillian’s alibi included a fish fry at his home, where family members and church parishioners sold food, and work on his truck’s transmission. Yet the community’s statements in his defense were treated differently from the accusation the authorities chose to credit.

That hierarchy surfaced again when Bryan Stevenson challenged prosecutor Tom Chapman over the case. Chapman dismissed the views of people who believed McMillian innocent as uninformed and insisted that evidence implicated him. The exchange shows how an official account could retain authority while community knowledge was discounted, even when people said they had been with McMillian miles away. The struggle over recognition thus extended beyond victims’ families to the credibility assigned to Black residents and defense witnesses.

Families left outside the story

The treatment of Mozelle and Onzelle, whose niece Vickie Pittman was murdered, provides the clearest contrast between the rhetoric of victims’ rights and families’ actual experience. They suspected that others, including their brother and local law enforcement, might have been involved, and they believed the prosecutor had disrespected and ignored them. They said they had been turned away even by the state victims’ rights organization. Their complaint was not that the system had failed to make victims visible in general, but that it had failed to see them.

Bryan Stevenson and his colleagues spent nearly three hours listening to the sisters. Onzelle told them they were the first people to come to the house and spend time talking about Vickie. Because the case was on direct appeal and the state was not required to provide its files, the attorneys filed an Alabama Rule 32 post-conviction petition to return to trial court, present new evidence, and seek discovery. The sisters’ experience led to a practical consequence: hearing an overlooked family’s account became a reason to pursue access to the records that might explain what happened.

The phrase All victims are equal therefore works as both a legal ideal and a test of institutional conduct. A rule limiting victim-impact evidence could guard against punishment driven by a family’s status or a jury’s emotions; expanded participation could give bereaved relatives a voice. Neither approach, by itself, could ensure that poor and minority families received calls, support, or a meaningful place in the process. The book’s central distinction is between declaring every victim equal and building a system that treats their losses as if they were.