[Thanos]

Some of Harper's reforms were so mild than in the pre-Charter days they would have been accepted by every court they went in front of. Only thirty years of the courts expanding the Charter and extending rights to individuals who in no one's imagination were ever intended to have those rights would result in something as simple as using a firearm in the commission of a crime not being deserving of extra punishment. It's only arming the courts with the Charter that caused this mess, given that they've taken every right of an individual and weaponized them by applying them full force to those (like Bernardo and pretty much every other violent criminal imaginable) who with their actions surrendered their right to be part of the public. When you review what Clifford Olsen alone got away with AFTER being imprisoned it becomes more and more evident that the changes the courts have forced on the national justice system after the Charter became supreme have been nothing but a massive failure, and served only to further torment victims of crime more than their original experience at the hands off the criminals had already harmed them.

[llama66]

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

Thanos Thanos:

That said, I can't support the death penalty because of six words:

David Milgaard and Donald Marshall Jr.

I think of the youngest person to be sentenced to death for a crime he didn't commit.

Steven Truscott.

That's why I can't support the death penalty.


My roommate used to walk past the French house every day, on his way to school, and I vividly remember the fear while I was in Grade 7.

Personally, I'd love to visit some serious violence upon Barnardo, its's not worth it.

As Mahatma Gandhi once said, and eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.

Harper's reforms were repealed because they were unconstitutional. I'm for reformation of the Criminal System so long as it is within the confines of the Canadian Constitution.

I've been the victim of a violent and serious offence, and my attacker got way less than he should have (one of the charges carried a Life sentence) but I moved on, Barnardo is still locked up, he isn't in the community, and he isn't able to re-offend, moreover even if the he behaving himself, he's still probably segregated. They can never put him in GP, and if they have in GP why the uproar? A prisoner should be able to sort this out right quick. Crimes against children are "frowned" upon in prison.

[DrCaleb]

Thanos Thanos:

Some of Harper's reforms were so mild than in the pre-Charter days they would have been accepted by every court they went in front of. Only thirty years of the courts expanding the Charter and extending rights to individuals who in no one's imagination were ever intended to have those rights would result in something as simple as using a firearm in the commission of a crime not being deserving of extra punishment. It's only arming the courts with the Charter that caused this mess, given that they've taken every right of an individual and weaponized them by applying them full force to those (like Bernardo and pretty much every other violent criminal imaginable) who with their actions surrendered their right to be part of the public.

That is the entire point of the Charter of Rights, is for the courts to have written guidelines of what is expected. Beforehand, lawyers had to argue that these rights actually existed from the Magna Carta and after because of prior decisions, after the Charter they could skip that step. Nothing really changed, other than what courts had already decided was enumerated and written down in one place.

And there are still a lot of laws on the books that violate the charter, but have not been repealed, so the Charter is still the measure of fairness.

llama66 llama66:

Harper's reforms were repealed because they were unconstitutional. I'm for reformation of the Criminal System so long as it is within the confines of the Canadian Constitution.

There are parts of the Charter that people don't like. But those parts are there to prevent the tyranny of the state from quashing the rights of the citizen. Our system is about Justice, not Vengeance. Harper's reforms were about Vengeance, not Justice.

[Thanos]

The social nature of the times and the cultural environment the judges were educated in & spent most of their careers in absolutely has an effect on their decisions. If the Charter was brought in during the 1950's instead of the 1980's, which had been altered greatly by the free-wheeling liberalism of the 1960's & 70's, there's no doubt at all that the majority of interpretations of it would be much more conservative and much less wide ranging.

[JaredMilne]

Thanos Thanos:

I don't think that Donald Marshall would have been eligible for execution if capital punishment were still in effect. He was inebriated at the time the crime he was falsely accused of happened and being in a drunken or stoned state at the time of murder has always been enough, even during our own "wild west" era to ensure that the death penalty would not be applied. Milgaard might have been eligible for the death penalty, given the ferocity of the rape & murder Larry Fisher had inflicted on Gail Miller. Once again though, given the nature of the times in the early 1970's, it would have been highly unlikely to have been imposed.

Given how Marshall was railroaded in his original trial, and the fact that even today Native people are jailed well out of proportion to their share of the national population, I'm not so sure he'd be given the consideration you describe. And it's just good luck that Milgaard didn't get a needle stuck in his arm.

There's still the risk of an innocent person being wrongfully executed, and I still stand by my previous point-as a human creation, the justice system sometimes fucks up. And while we can remedy the fuckup if it took away a person's freedom, we can't remedy the fuckup if it took away their life.

[herbie]

The death penalty was gone 50 years ago, so a political leader blurting out what he did is not acceptable today.
This endless calling for Ministers to resign over every little thing they 'don't like' simply ensures that people like me will never consider voting Tory again. The last time I did was for Mulroney who's now calling down their "F Trudeau" trash talk.

[Scape]

^^ This.

[Scape]

[Thanos]

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

Thanos Thanos:

I don't think that Donald Marshall would have been eligible for execution if capital punishment were still in effect. He was inebriated at the time the crime he was falsely accused of happened and being in a drunken or stoned state at the time of murder has always been enough, even during our own "wild west" era to ensure that the death penalty would not be applied. Milgaard might have been eligible for the death penalty, given the ferocity of the rape & murder Larry Fisher had inflicted on Gail Miller. Once again though, given the nature of the times in the early 1970's, it would have been highly unlikely to have been imposed.

Given how Marshall was railroaded in his original trial, and the fact that even today Native people are jailed well out of proportion to their share of the national population, I'm not so sure he'd be given the consideration you describe. And it's just good luck that Milgaard didn't get a needle stuck in his arm.

There's still the risk of an innocent person being wrongfully executed, and I still stand by my previous point-as a human creation, the justice system sometimes fucks up. And while we can remedy the fuckup if it took away a person's freedom, we can't remedy the fuckup if it took away their life.

In the cases of Marshall and Milgaard the risk wasn't that severe. The last execution in Canada happened in 1962. Milgaard's false imprisonment happened in 1968 and Marshall's in 1971. By then both the Pearson and Trudean governments put pursuing the death penalty on the back burner and prosecutors didn't bring it up in court during trials anymore. The penalty was abolished in 1976 altogether.

Keep in mind that the nature of the times rules the moment. I suspect that if even some vile thing like Clifford Olson had committed his crimes and been apprehended in the late 1960's or early 70's he still would have been spared the death penalty in Pearson & Trudeau's Canada. It's just the way it was back then, with the starry-eyed & hyper-energetic social liberalism of the era falling all over itself in any way it could in order to spare "cruel" treatment even to those who fit the literal definition of evil.