Everyone in Hawaii — across the nation, for that matter — can sympathize with victims of crime. Sadly, for too many, it’s more of an empathetic reaction, given the probability that crime touches most of us at some point.

Survivors of crimes and their families need to be informed about the prosecution of their case and feel that their voice is heard.

Too often, according to reams of anecdotal evidence, government does a poor job of looking out for the victims’ welfare, and that must improve.

The question is: How can that be done?

There’s already a state law on the books here. Improving on its enforcement, giving agencies the resources to advocate effectively for victims, clearly deserves priority attention. Today there are websites, such as vinelink.com, that make it simple to notify people about the status of cases.

However, an amendment to the state Constitution, as competing versions of legislation now seek, would neither be an appropriate vehicle for change, nor necessarily an effective one.

By itself, it would not correct what is essentially an administrative failure of government, but it very well could complicate the process of prosecuting a defendant within the bounds of his or her constitutional protections.

The wording of similar amendments varies in the 32 states nationwide that have adopted it, but generically it is known as “Marsy’s Law,” named for Marsalee (Marsy) Nicholas, a California college student who was murdered and whose family was frustrated by failures to alert them about the status of the defendant and the case.

One version of the Hawaii legislation, House Bill 1144, proposes adding language to the state Constitution that states a crime victim or a surviving immediate family member has rights that can be asserted in the course of their case prosecution.

They include timely notification of developments and an offer to participate and be heard in proceedings related to the offense — “unless the court determines that the victim’s presence would materially affect the victim’s testimony.”

This bill, a revision of the original introduced last session, was redrafted by House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Karl Rhoads, based on the wording of the federal victim’s rights law. It was meant to lay out the principles of victim protections, Rhoads said, leaving it to future laws to work out the implementation details.

The legislation includes this caveat: “No right in this section shall be construed to supersede the constitutional rights of the offender.”

But the concern of the critics — who included state Rep. Joy San Buenaventura, vice-chair of the House Judiciary Committee — is that there would be real-world complications in how the rights are balanced.

She argued, correctly, that something short of a constitutional amendment — better oversight by agencies set up as victims’ advocates at the county and state levels, for example — would be the better objective.

Further, critics such as the American Civil Liberties Union have pointed out that the statute is there to protect the victim.

“The statutes have the force of law,” ACLU Hawaii attorney Dan Gluck said in an interview last week. “The judges ought to follow those as well as they follow the Constitution.”

The purpose of a constitutional bill of rights is protection of the individual — as currently stands, someone accused of a crime — against abuse of governmental power. The fact that in many cases the government fails to support victims is a sign that agencies need better resources and procedures to carry out that mission; it’s not a reason to put a defendant’s rights at risk.

Rick Sing, president of the Hawaii Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, proposed a scenario in which victims did not appear at a proceeding as expected; that by itself doesn’t mean they waived a constitutional right, and that could compel the court to cancel. The execution of a constitutional provision is likely to have unintended consequences, he said.

“The system shouldn’t be driven by how active or persistent a victim is,” Sing said, and he’s right.

In a crime, the accused is the one who needs constitutional protection against the government. A victim is properly seen as the responsibility of the government to serve, and the government should be pressed — through statute and adequate government support, not a constitu-tional amendment — to fulfill that duty.