UNITED STATES
Legal Examiner
Posted by Mike Bryant
May 22, 2014
Over time, I have heard a number of victim impact statements. Some are touching, others seem to miss the point. They can be rambling dissertations that make everyone in the courtroom uncomfortable or even confused. They are sometimes read by the lawyers in the case, but in those circumstances they seem more like a performance than an actual heartfelt statement. There are even times where they hurt the real effort to punish. My advice when a client asks about what to say is:
1. Speak from the heart.
2. Stick to what the real damage was.
3. Get it down to be as succinct as possible.
I was sent the following statement recently. For background a priest named Robert Poandl was sentenced to 7 ½ years in federal prison for raping a 10-year-old boy in 1991. He was convicted by a jury in September of 2013. This is the statement that the 6’5” 280-pound former football player survivor read in court:
Victim Impact Statement
I cannot possibly convey the swath of destruction that lay in Robert Poandl’s wake. We all create ripple effects in the universe around us. These ripple effects can be negative, positive or something in between. I have no doubt Robert helped many people and did many good works, making positive ripple effects. His family and friends are convinced of his innocence which both he and I know is amazing. It attests to the power of faith and love. How anyone could sit through his trial and not be convinced of his guilt is remarkable; Robert certainly did not react when a jury of his peers found him guilty. The sad fact is his family and friends do not truly know him. No person can completely know the depths of another person but they are not even close to knowing his true nature. Unfortunately, I was exposed to his true nature in August of 1991 and have been in a living hell much of the time since. I was a kind and trusting child from a modest family, but that ended that night. He used my parents’ faith in God and Catholicism against them. They too were blinded by faith and love. He preyed on the weak and the poor. He preyed on children to satisfy his own deviant sexual desires. He dropped a nuclear bomb on my psyche. These negative ripple effects did not stop with me. They do not stop with his victims but are transferred to those around them. The angry child who felt betrayed by his parents and by God raged against those who he saw as his betrayers. He saw the world as one without meaning or God. He could not reconcile an omniscient and omnipotent God who loved him with the reality of being handed over to a servant of this God by his mother and then anally raped and told he had in some way sinned.
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