The needs of homicide victims are very specific, I guess, more so than many crimes, because there is no coming back from a murder. When a person is murdered, they're gone. There's no way to fix it. There's no way to change it. There's no way to pay it back. That's why we need to look at the term “restorative justice”, for example, because there's no restoring in a homicide.
The co-victims, the families and so on, of those who have lost their lives through the deliberate act of somebody else are often very angry. They are victimized initially by the crime, but they feel revictimized by the system. Then, when the system fails them by allowing somebody to achieve parole early or to plea bargain down to a lesser sentence that then carries a very small amount of time, they feel even more angry. Their anger is often then directed at the justice system.
There are many ways in which victims are revictimized through the process and there are many ways in which the offender's rights are valued greater than the victim's rights. Here's just one minor thing with regard to parole hearings, for example. When you go to a parole hearing as a victim, it's a shocking experience. I remember being in shock and not remembering a lot of what happened in that parole hearing, coming face to face with the killer of my son. At the end of it all, he gets a transcript of what went on in that parole hearing and I don't because I was there. Yet I don't remember it.
That's one small example of how people are revictimized over and over again. There are many, many more.
Perhaps I'll let the other person speak.