Opinion ID: 170350
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Impact on co-workers

Text: Barrett supports the validity of victim-impact evidence regarding friends who (also) worked with the victim. But as to co-workers per se, a victim-impact inquiry would have a qualitatively different character. The loss of a co-worker in this sense (for example, the loss of her contribution to an office, unit, or team; the kind of loss that businesses insure with key man policies) is very far afield from the personal loss discussed in cases following the Supreme Court's initial approval of victim-impact evidence from family members in Payne v. Tennessee, 501 U.S. 808, 111 S.Ct. 2597, 115 L.Ed.2d 720 (1991). Without additional guidance from the Court encouraging further expansion of the victim-impact inquiry, we are not willing to extend it to the impersonal utilitarian considerations included within the idea of a loss to co-workers. But any error in this regard was purely formalistic. The sole co-worker to testify, Charles Miliara, was also Charles Chick's close friend. He only briefly alluded to their work together, once to note their first meeting (a story illustrating Chick's easy-going manner in the face of an apprehensive and testy Miliara), R. Vol. 15 at 2607-08, and once to point up an irony in another personal story (involving the two men, whose jobs entailed creating instructions for assembling fighter jets, trying to assemble a train set for Miliara's son on Christmas without instructions), id. at 2620-21. In substance, Miliara's testimony concerned the loss of a friend and was not categorically different from that allowed in Barrett. Nor did the government argue' the matter differently to the jury. While the concept of victim impact should not have extended to the category of co-workers per se, that category was in fact empty and the error was harmless.