Everyone lives their own story. In a sense, each one of us are protagonists in our own story. We are met with challenges in life and try, as we do or don't, to overcome and reach resolution.
For the most part, those who have encountered The Public Duty Doctrine are tragic characters. The morning they walked out of the house was like any other morning. They believed certain things. And by end of day they found their life, or what they believed in, was a lie. They slumbered their way through life, and now they are excruciatingly awake.
In my "Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, written by Chris Baldick, 1996, page 95, there is a word that embraces victim/witnesses, those who encounter the criminal justice system with certain expectations and find that those expectations were false. That word is hamartia.
Quoting, "Hamartia (pronounced ha mar te a), the greek word for error or failure, used by Aristotle in his Poetics (4th century BC) to designate the false step that leads the protagonist in a tragedy to his or her downfall. The term has often been translated as 'tragic flaw' but this misleadingly confines the cause of the reversal of fortunes to some personal defect of character, whereas Aristotle's emphasis was rather upon the protagonist's action, which could be brought about by misjudgment, ignorance or some other cause."
Examples of hamartia (just to name a few):
South v. Maryland (1855)
Buck vs. Bell (1927) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_vs._Bell
Warren v. District of Columbia (1981)
DeShaney v. Winnebago County (1989)
Stone et al. v. N.C. Department of Labor (1997)
Akre v. Fox News (2003)
Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005)
Victims of Madoff & SEC (2009)
Victims of other financial scandals: http://timelinesdb.com/listevents.php?subjid=657&title=Corp.%20Scandal
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