Any victim of crime deserves to be treated with respect and dignity by the criminal justice process. Though the ultimate goal of the criminal justice system is to determine who is responsible for the commission of a crime and to hold that person accountable, the system lacks credibility if it does anything but treat victims with respect, honor their dignity, and respect their privacy.

We should enshrine these three rights, which are being repeated often by the proponents of Marsy’s Law. However, I question those that insist there is but one and only one way to enshrine those rights. And that one way is to add 395 very specific words to our state constitution.

Rather than taking language from our own state’s statutory victims’ bill of rights and adding it to the constitution, Marsy’s Law would copy the 395 words of a national model law, without making a single word change to reflect New Hampshire’s existing constitution and statutory rights.

That approach is unlike anything New Hampshire has ever done with its constitution – one that was written before the U.S. Constitution. Our state constitution is, by design, a minimalist document intended to lay out a set of operating principles and to leave their implementation to statutes.

For example, Part I, the Bill of Rights and the spot where this 395-word amendment would be located, has only five articles that efficiently address rights and responsibilities in the criminal justice system. Most of those are less than 150 words and the longest article briefly articulates at least nine broad foundational constitutional principles. Moreover, these five articles decidedly do not read like statutes.

By contrast, the proposed Marsy’s Law constitutional amendment reads exactly like a statute – to no surprise as, in large part, it mimics the procedures for giving victims respect, dignity and privacy in New Hampshire’s existing statutory victims’ rights statute. And yet despite its similarities to our existing statutory rights, Marsy’s Law proponents insist on using national model language that is at stark odds with how we use our constitution.

Marsy’s Law's origins are in a California electoral proposition to amend their Constitution passed by a simple majority of votes. That constitution is filled with remarkably lengthy amendments that actually do read like statutes. It’s a very different way to craft constitutional language. The California way does not work in our state. The proposed Marsy’s Law amendment is poor and mistaken constitutional draftsmanship, inconsistent with 200-plus years of New Hampshire’s constitutional draftsmanship.

The solution is not to ignore, forget or otherwise diminish victims’ rights as th proponents of the Marsy’s Law amendment accuse its skeptics of doing. Rather the common-sense solution is to (1) state the foundational principle in the constitutional amendment and (2) have that inform and strengthen courts’ interpretation of the more detailed description of rights in the victims’ rights statute. The legislature can easily amend the statute if there are institutional, versus resource, flaws in it. Most importantly, the enduring foundational principle that encapsulates victims’ rights is simple and clear: “A victim of crime has the right to be treated with fairness and respect for the victim’s safety, dignity and privacy.”

That is the New Hampshire way.

Albert "Buzz" Scherr is a constitutional and criminal procedure scholar at UNH School of Law where he has been for 25 years. He has been involved in the New Hampshire criminal justice system since 1981 as a practitioner, scholar and teacher of prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges. He lives in Portsmouth with his wife and daughter.