(This column was published in the North Shore News on Sept. 1, 2004)
Justice system remains too often powerless
By Leo Knight
ON Saturday morning I was driving through Chinatown.
On the corner of Carrall and Keefer streets, yellow crime scene tape fluttered in the breeze, the aftermath of yet another murder in the streets of our city. There were a number of police officers going about the business of picking up the pieces of another violent night.
Across the street, five bedraggled men sat on the curb watching the activity. Amusing themselves with the live theatre playing out, they sat there, holding crack pipes in one hand, constantly flicking lighters to keep their rocks lit as they inhaled the chemical destruction a mere 10 metres from the police officers.
All over the Downtown Eastside and in parts of the West End, crack heads openly smoke their drugs and the police rarely intervene. There's no point. If they seize the drugs and try to file charges, it is highly unlikely the Crown will approve them, unwilling to put such minor crimes into a system struggling under the weight of an overburdened docket.
There is now talk of a so-called "safe inhalation" site for crack heads to smoke, supposedly along the lines of the safe injection site on East Hastings Street. The idea, as I understand it, is to have a gentle intervention with the dopeheads when they come in to try and persuade them to get help for their addiction. A noble goal, on the surface at least, to try and help people committing suicide on the instalment plan.
But, at the end of the day, the only people they will truly help are those who want it. It's a fact with any addiction, be it crack, marijuana, booze, heroin or nicotine: if the individual does not want to get clean, no amount of intervention will change the situation.
In the meantime, the crack heads are stealing everything that's not nailed down to support their Jones and some things that are. They get caught time after time and put into a system that throws them back on probation, probation on top of probation or in the more extreme cases, with a conditional sentence that has no effect whatsoever.
Speaking of conditional sentences, a period of "custody" where the criminal is actually not in custody, I told you last week of a prosecutor, Walter Costa in Essex County, Ont., who stood up in court and called conditional sentences a "fraud" perpetrated on the people of Canada by the federal government. The presiding judge, Mr. Justice Gordon Thomson, agreed with the prosecutor at the sentencing hearing of Casey Wilcock who had been found guilty of criminal negligence causing death and four other charges.
Thomson mused, "If the sentence has no teeth, what's the point?" And he is right.
But Thomson reserved his decision for a few days to contemplate what he would do in the case.
The result?
Nothing. Business as usual. Wilcock got a conditional sentence. In his sentencing comments, Mr. Justice Thomson said he had no choice but to impose the useless sentence. Had he done anything else he said, he would have been reversed on appeal and the conditional sentence imposed anyway.
So there you have the state of justice in Canada. The criminal class do anything they want, wherever they want and the system cannot or will not do anything to prevent, correct or contain the problem.
A judge who even contemplates trying to do something, ultimately comes to the conclusion there is nothing to be done without a fundamental change in the laws and sentencing provisions laid out by the top courts.
In the same week, the prime minister appointed two more liberal activist judges to the Supreme Court bench guaranteeing that for the immediate future at least, it will be more of the same.
Sigh.
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