(This column was published in the North Shore News on Sept. 8, 2004)
Get mad at broken system
By Leo Knight
THE justice system in our country is broken.
No revelation to the regular reader of this space, but since we've been discussing conditional sentences the past couple of weeks, I have had some e-mails from people wondering how we have gotten to this point.
Some people seem to think that when a murderer is convicted and they get sentenced to life in prison, they actually spend the rest of their life in prison. Well, not so in our demented Dominion.
As proven in Vernon last month, with the murder of senior citizen William Abramenko allegedly by Eric Norman Fish while taking a sojourn from a halfway house, the aim of Corrections Canada is to repatriate every inmate into the mainstream of society, come what may.
And, if a few more people happen to get killed by the killers they are trying to reintegrate, well that's the price to be paid for the greater good.
So it seems is the logic coming from the hand-wringers and social engineers who head the corrections part of the justice system.
Fish was jailed for life after the brutal murder of a Windsor man in 1984.
The victim was beaten, stabbed and strangled for good measure.
The national parole board hearing which defied logic in granting Fish day parole, said he "was a high risk to violently reoffend." But that didn't matter and out he went.
He walked away from the halfway house in Vernon in June. It wasn't until early August, two days after the violent home invasion that took Abramenko's life, that the RCMP issued a bulletin, and even when they finally did, they only noted it was for "suspension of day parole."
They conveniently left out the part of his violent past or the findings of the parole board that he was "a high risk to violently reoffend."
The Fish case is just an example though, of a badly flawed system.
The federal Liberal government has for years been trying to rid the jails of criminals. They want fully half of all persons sentenced to jail to serve that time in the community, under some sort of supervision.
It is the sort of fuzzy-headed, liberal, utopian thinking that directly led to the murder of Abramenko.
But the trickle-down effect has essentially come to mean in the system that for all but the most egregious offences, judges cannot sentence anyone to actually go to jail even when they are confronted with evidence that the so-called supervision isn't working.
Look at the case of the Northlands Golf Course bookkeeper Christie Ham-mond. She stole nearly $250,000 of your money from North Vancouver District and got a conditional sentence of two years less a day to be served in the community.
She was back in court in late month, ostensibly to clarify a clerical error relating to the 100 hours of community service she had to perform, and in which part of her sentence it was to be completed.
A side issue was the perception by her neighbours that she was essentially free to do whatever, instead of actually suffering any consequence for stealing your money.
Edgemont resident Brian Platts wrote to Judge Judith Gedye complaining that he and other residents were "angry and frustrated that justice is not being served."
In court, Gedye refused to clarify times when Hammond would be allowed to leave her home saying, "the more we define specific times, the more problems we create."
Apparently the good lady judge doesn't want to inconvenience someone who stole your money.
And it's not just here, either. In Montreal last week, Dennis Schmouth, the accountant for an order of nuns, was convicted of stealing $100 million from them. He got a 24-month conditional sentence to be served in the community for his troubles. Exactly one day longer than Hammond.
Bilking nearly a quarter of a million taxpayer dollars can't get you jail time evidently, and neither can stealing $100 million from nuns, for God's sake.
So when I say the system is badly broken you can now understand. If someone actually gets sent to jail, the hand-wringers will do their level best to let them out even if they are a significant risk to violently reoffend, like Fish. But the more common reality is no matter what crime is committed, in Canada, the offender won't go to jail in the first place.
So, get used to it, as Judge Gedye made clear in her treatment of Hammond, or get mad. Maybe if a lot more people copied Platts and made some noise to the politicians and judges they might actually begin to understand.
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