University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law 1-1-2010 Documentation, Documentary, and the Law: What Should Be Made of Victim Impact Videos? Regina Austin University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Broadcast and Video Studies Commons, Criminal Law Commons, Criminology Commons, Criminology and Criminal Justice Commons, Entertainment, Arts, and Sports Law Commons, Evidence Commons, Law and Society Commons, Law Enforcement and Corrections Commons, Public Law and Legal Theory Commons, and the Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance Commons Repository Citation Austin, Regina, "Documentation, Documentary, and the Law: What Should Be Made of Victim Impact Videos?" (2010). Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law. 313. https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/313 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law by an authorized administrator of Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. AUSTIN.31-4 4/18/2010 6:25:15 PM DOCUMENTATION, DOCUMENTARY, AND THE LAW: WHAT SHOULD BE MADE OF VICTIM IMPACT VIDEOS? Regina Austin∗ I. “SARA NOKOMIS WEIR: 1974-1993” When a majority of the Supreme Court rejected appeals in two capital cases involving the admissibility of victim impact videos, Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer disagreed and wrote separately respecting the denials of certiorari.1 The victim in one of the cases was Sara Weir, a nineteen-year-old young woman who was raped, stabbed with scissors twenty-nine times, and robbed by Douglas Kelly, a personal trainer who frequented the gym where she worked out.2 Kelly left Weir’s body under a bed in his girlfriend’s apartment, where the body was discovered by the girlfriend’s ten-year-old son.3 Kelly was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death.