The State Does Not Represent You

How the myth of victim-centered prosecution hides a system built entirely around state interest — and what it costs when your wishes don’t align with the docket.

By Rita Williams  |  Clutch Justice  |  March 2026

There is a version of the criminal legal system in which victims are the moral center of prosecution. The state acts as their surrogate. The prosecutor carries their interests into court. The process delivers accountability on their behalf.

That version has never been the operative one.

The actual system is organized around state interest: securing convictions, managing dockets, negotiating pleas, and allocating prosecutorial resources. Victims appear in that structure primarily as witnesses, as sympathetic context for sentencing arguments, and — when their cooperation is needed — as parties worth consulting. When victim preferences align with what the state intends to do anyway, the system is responsive. When they don’t, the system continues without them.

This is not a malfunction. It is the design.

In an earlier piece, Clutch Justice examined how procedural pressure operates as a litigation strategy — how legal machinery gets deployed not to resolve disputes on the merits but to exhaust, delay, and foreclose. The myth of victim-centered prosecution operates similarly: it functions as institutional cover. It allows the system to describe itself as serving victims while structurally subordinating victim interest to prosecutorial discretion at every critical decision point.

What the Law Actually Gives Victims

The Crime Victims’ Rights Act of 2004 (CVRA), codified at 18 U.S.C. § 3771, represents the most significant federal codification of victim rights in American history. It guarantees crime victims in federal proceedings the right to be reasonably heard at public proceedings involving release, plea, and sentencing; the right to confer with the government’s attorney; the right to be treated with fairness and respect for dignity; and the right to proceedings free from unreasonable delay.¹

What the CVRA does not grant is the right to control prosecutorial decisions. The right to confer is not the right to direct. The right to be heard is not the right to be followed.

This distinction is not an oversight. Courts interpreting the CVRA have held that victims have procedural participation rights, not substantive veto authority. In In re Dean, the Fifth Circuit found that the government’s failure to consult with victims before entering a plea agreement was contrary to the CVRA’s conferral requirement — but the court did not vacate the plea agreement or provide victims with outcome control.² The structure of victim rights law creates process obligations, not outcome obligations.

Many states have enacted constitutional or statutory victim-rights provisions, and Marsy’s-Law-branded campaigns have expanded those provisions in a number of states since the California initiative first passed in 2008.³ Marsy’s-Law-style amendments typically expand the procedural protections available to victims: notice of proceedings, the right to be present, the right to restitution, and the right to be heard. They do not displace prosecutorial control over charging and plea decisions. The right to be heard remains procedural.

Michigan already recognizes crime-victim rights in its constitution and statutes, rather than relying on a later Marsy’s-Law-branded amendment campaign. Article I, Section 24 of the Michigan Constitution establishes victim rights as a matter of state constitutional law.⁴ The statutory framework is governed by the William Van Regenmorter Crime Victim’s Rights Act, MCL 780.751 et seq., which requires prosecutors to inform victims of case proceedings, notify them of plea negotiations, and provide opportunity for input at sentencing.⁵ It does not require prosecutors to follow victim recommendations.

Available remedies under Michigan’s framework are limited and often narrow in practice. Depending on the context, victims may pursue administrative complaints, mandamus against nonjudicial officers, or other extraordinary relief — none of which gives them ordinary control over charging or plea outcomes.⁶

The Academic Record on Victim Participation

Legal scholars examining victim participation rights have identified a persistent structural gap between the rhetorical commitments of victim-centered prosecution and its operational reality.

Douglas Beloof, whose work on victims as the third party in criminal adjudication remains foundational to this field, argues that victim participation has been grafted onto an adversarial system designed for two-party conflict.⁷ The prosecution-defense binary has no structural slot for victim interest as an independent variable. Victim participation rights were added to the system without restructuring the decision authority that governs its outcomes. The result is a set of procedural accommodations that do not disturb the underlying architecture of prosecutorial discretion.

The gap between victim participation rights on paper and victim experience in practice has been documented in the legal literature. Victims who attempt to exercise consultation rights frequently encounter a system that treats the conferral requirement as a notice obligation rather than a genuine deliberative process.⁸ Victims are informed of decisions. They are not consulted in any meaningful sense before those decisions are made.

The tension this creates is a principled conflict between two incompatible theories of prosecution. Under a state-interest model, the prosecutor represents the public in vindicating the public’s interest in law enforcement. Under a victim-centered model, the prosecutor acts as a surrogate for the individual harmed. The American system has nominally endorsed victim-centered rhetoric while preserving the state-interest operational structure. That combination produces the experience documented in the academic literature: victims who are formally included and substantively sidelined.

The research on domestic violence prosecution is particularly instructive. In jurisdictions with mandatory prosecution policies, the state proceeds regardless of victim preference — a design explicitly intended to remove individual victims from the equation in cases where coercive control may affect their stated wishes.⁹ The policy rationale is coherent. But it also demonstrates, more clearly than most contexts, that prosecutorial authority is not derivative of victim preference. It is independent of it. The state decides. Victim wishes are a factor, not a directive.

Michigan’s Notification Gap and the VINE Record

In Michigan, the operational disconnect between victim rights and victim experience is visible in state-level reporting on victim notification infrastructure.

Michigan’s victim-notification infrastructure depends on accurate data handoff and registration processes. Victims must be enrolled in MI-VINE — the Victim Information and Notification Everyday system — to receive notification of offender status changes, including release, transfer, or parole.¹⁰ Public state reporting has documented ongoing gaps in MI-VINE participation and notification coverage, including failures attributable to contact information that was never collected, collected inaccurately, or not transmitted through the chain from county prosecution to corrections.¹¹

The consequence is straightforward. A victim who is not enrolled in MI-VINE does not receive notification when an offender is released, transferred, or granted parole. Their right to be heard at a parole hearing is formally intact. Practically, they may not know the hearing is occurring.

This is the administrative layer of the myth. The rights exist on paper. The infrastructure to make those rights functional is incomplete, dependent on data transmission chains between county prosecutors, circuit courts, and state corrections that break down with regularity. The system’s formal commitment to victim participation is real. Its operational delivery of that participation is not.

The enrollment gap is not confined to low-profile cases. It is a systemic characteristic of the data handoff between prosecution and corrections — a governance gap that no single agency owns and that no current legislative mechanism requires anyone to close.

What the Megan Moryc Case Illustrates

The Megan Moryc case provides a Michigan-based illustration of how victim preference gets processed — and discarded — within prosecutorial decision-making.

Moryc’s case involved a prosecutorial charging and disposition process in which she was never consulted. The prosecution’s path forward was nonexistent. The divergence was not the product of evidentiary constraints that made the victim’s preferred outcome legally unavailable. It was a product of prosecutorial discretion exercised in the direction of state interest rather than victim interest.¹²

Having reviewed the publicly available record in this matter, the record establishes that victim preference was never documented and essentially there was no disposition at all. What the record does not establish is the internal deliberative process by which that divergence occurred and why it was not documented, nor treated as procedurally noted and substantively irrelevant. That distinction matters for accountability purposes, especially when denying any meaningful outcome for the victim.

Sadly, Moryc’s case is not exceptional; it’s representative of the norm. The administrative record in Michigan courts contains similar patterns across a range of case types and counties. What makes it useful analytically is its clarity: the documented preference, the divergent outcomes, and the absence of any formal mechanism by which the victim could challenge the prosecutorial decision that produced said outcomes.

The Structural Logic of Prosecutorial Discretion

To understand why victim wishes are systematically subordinated to prosecutorial decision-making, it helps to understand what prosecutorial discretion is and why it has survived constitutional challenge.

Prosecutorial discretion is the authority of the executive branch — through its prosecutorial agents — to decide whether to charge, what to charge, whether to offer a plea, and what to recommend at sentencing. Courts have treated this authority as core executive power, insulated from judicial review except in narrow circumstances involving discriminatory enforcement or constitutional violation.¹³

The doctrinal justification is resource allocation: the criminal justice system processes far more potential cases than it could fully prosecute, and someone must have the authority to set priorities. Prosecutors set those priorities based on evidentiary strength, case significance, available resources, office policy, and — in jurisdictions with elected prosecutors — political calculation. Victim preference is one input among many, weighted at the prosecutor’s discretion.

This is not inherently corrupt. A system that gave each individual victim veto authority over charging decisions would create different and significant problems — including the potential for victims in civil disputes disguised as criminal matters to weaponize prosecution, and the practical impossibility of consistent enforcement when victim preferences vary widely across similarly situated cases.

But the doctrinal protection of prosecutorial discretion has a cost that the system has not honestly accounted for: it means that the language of victim-centered prosecution is describing something that cannot, under current doctrine, actually exist. The system cannot simultaneously vest final charging authority in prosecutors and describe those prosecutors as victim representatives. The two propositions are in structural conflict. American criminal law has resolved that conflict in favor of prosecutorial authority while continuing to deploy victim-centered rhetoric as though the conflict did not exist.

Michigan’s Framework and the Reform That Has Not Come

Michigan’s constitutional and statutory victim-rights framework is worth examining not as a failure to act, but as an illustration of the gap between formal rights recognition and operational delivery.

Marsy’s-Law-style amendments establish procedural rights for victims. They do not establish coequal decision-making authority. Prosecutors operating in Marsy’s Law states retain full discretion over charging and plea decisions. Michigan’s own constitutional provision — Article I, Section 24 — similarly establishes procedural rights of notice, presence, and participation that do not displace prosecutorial discretion.¹⁴

In the absence of stronger enforcement mechanisms, Michigan victims operate under a framework that predates modern criminal case processing and the dominance of plea-based disposition.¹⁵ The statute dates to 1985. The gap between what that framework promises and what it delivers has widened as case volume increased and prosecutorial decision-making became more concentrated at earlier stages of the process — before victims typically have any formal role at all.

What Reform Would Actually Require

Honest reform of the victim participation framework requires confronting the structural conflict between prosecutorial discretion and victim agency rather than papering over it with additional procedural rights.

Several reform directions have credible support in the academic and policy literature.

The first is mandatory victim consultation protocols with documentation requirements. Under this model, prosecutors would be required to document victim consultation before finalizing charging decisions and plea offers, and that documentation would be subject to review — not to override prosecutorial discretion, but to create an accountability record. The current conferral requirement under the CVRA and Michigan’s statute is largely unverifiable. A documentation requirement would make compliance legible.¹⁶

The second is victim standing to raise CVRA violations before a plea is entered rather than after. Currently, courts have interpreted available remedies narrowly, and a plea agreement entered without victim consultation cannot be unwound solely on that basis after the fact. Expanding prospective relief would give consultation rights operational teeth rather than theoretical existence.¹⁷

The third, specific to Michigan, is a legislative mandate to close the MI-VINE enrollment gap. This is the least contested reform available: requiring a verifiable data handoff between county prosecutors and the state victim-services infrastructure at the time of sentencing, with audit authority in the Attorney General’s office, would address the administrative layer of the notification failure without touching prosecutorial discretion at all. It is an operational fix for an operational problem.

The fourth is the harder conversation: whether Michigan’s constitutional victim-rights framework should be modernized with precision and enforceability in mind. A provision drafted with explicit attention to the doctrinal conflict between victim rights and prosecutorial authority, in consultation with defense bar organizations, could establish a more durable framework than the 1985 statute. That conversation has not happened in a form that produced results. The gap between Michigan’s formal rights recognition and its operational delivery is the specification for what would need to change.

What the System Reveals About Itself

The myth of victim-centered prosecution is most clearly exposed not in cases where the system fails dramatically, but in cases where it functions exactly as designed and still leaves victims behind.

A prosecutor who never meets with a victim before trial, puts that victim on the stand without preparation, and advocates for a sentence the victim did not request has not done anything that current law prohibits. The system produced that outcome through its normal operation. The victim’s wishes were noted in the file. The file did not change the outcome.

The Moryc case. The MI-VINE enrollment gap. The unenforced conferral requirements of the CVRA. The 1985 framework Michigan has not meaningfully updated. These are not isolated failures. They are the system operating at its designed tolerance for victim irrelevance.

Prosecution in America is a state function. It has always been a state function. The state’s interest and the victim’s interest frequently overlap, and when they do, the system appears to work. When they diverge, the system reveals its actual priorities.

Accountability requires naming that accurately. The state does not represent victims. It represents the state. Any reform framework built on a different assumption will inherit the same gap it was designed to close.