That being the case, with those guidelines, do victim impact statements have an effect upon your sentencing or are they mainly to help the victims express their sorrow, their loss?

Yes, it's difficult.

I think one view is the latter view, that it's about giving victims a voice so that they express their sorrow loss, as you say.

The other is, and sorry, consistent with that view is, and I remember it being said when victim impact statements first came in by very senior and experienced people like Frank Vincent and others who'd done crime for years as judges and barristers, that really all victim impact statements do, and this is not a quote from Frank, by the way, this is the gist of it as I understood it, that is tell us what we already would have assumed anyway.

A person loses a child, it's the worst thing that can happen to a parent.

We know that.

We know that it must be horrible.

you know,