(Prime Time Crime exclusive Jan. 8, 2007)
A haven for murderers
By Leo Knight
It’s happening again. The Canadian government is standing in the way of American justice because of some ideological nonsense on the part of the bureaucracy.
In June of 2005, Timothy Dale Wallace, 40, was estranged from his wife Brandy, 25, a nurse and the mother of their three children. A little after two in the morning, Wallace forced his way into Brandy’s home and shot her and her boyfriend, Billy Hassel, 29, to death. It was a brutal, pre-meditated double murder.
A couple of hours after the shootings, Wallace called 9-1-1 and spoke to operator Lee Ann Cleghorn who did a marvelous job of keeping Wallace on the phone until he could be apprehended by police. As it happened, Cleghorn kept Wallace on the phone for four hours, calming him. The incident ended following a four hour armed stand-off.
Wallace was given bail in the amount of $500,000 by a judge who apparently had previously acted for him in a child custody matter. While on bail, the defence did the usual delay tactics and a number of adjournments were given. Then, just weeks before his trial was to start, Wallace became a fugitive ultimately ending up in a motel room in Longview, Alberta, where the RCMP arrested him while he was speaking with Sheriff’s Sgt. Paul Viner in a remarkable display of cooperation between the Sheriffs, the FBI and the RCMP.
Then started the legal wrangling to try and frustrate the efforts of the local authorities to put Wallace on trial. Arkansas is one of the 38 states that has the death penalty in capital murder cases.
Initially, Wallace said he wouldn’t contest the deportation and waived his right to counsel. At the hearing, Immigration and Refugee Board adjudicator Paul Kyba said, “Canada is not to be a place of refuge for person's fleeing criminal charges in another country.”
Well, apparently it is.
The mandarins at the federal Department of Justice have now stepped in. “We don't have it here, and we basically find it as cruel and unusual (punishment)," said Chris Girouard, spokesman for the Department of Justice. “It's like sending people to their death, it's not something we do in Canada.”
Perhaps it is not something we do, but it certainly is something we should be doing. And no, I'm not saying we arbitrarily send people to their death. I am saying that if someone is accused of an egregious crime committed in a jurisdiction that carries the death penalty and we have a bona fide extradition treaty with the jurisdiction and upon a judicial review of the evidence, we should not try and place conditions on the extradition.
The liberal-left intelligentsia, who are responsible for most of what’s wrong in this country, cluck their tongues in derision when talking about states in America who have capital punishment on their books. Well, more accurately, they cluck their tongues in derision when discussing most things American, but especially when they are talking about capital punishment.
But, the reality is that most Canadians still support the death penalty and no amount of tongue-clucking will change that. Poll after poll has demonstrated this fact. Admitedly, the size of the majority has diminished over the past ten years, but it is still a majority.
So, when Chris Girouard speaks on behalf of the DoJ, he is speaking on behalf of the hand-wringing bureaucrats who have been running the place for years, not for Canadians.
The reality of the situation is that if Arkansas refuses to take the death penalty off the table in this case, Canada will refuse to send Wallace back. And, with nothing to hold him then, he will be freed to walk around and start a new life. Free even to start a relationship with another woman. And free to kill her if things don’t work out.
The hand-wringers just can’t get their heads around that reality. Somehow, they think this is preferable to sending a murderer back from whence he came so that he may be dealt with according to the law in the jurisdiction where the unspeakable crimes were committed.
The Canadian government has to say enough is enough. Despite what was said by Paul Kybe, we are being used as a safe haven by murderers. And while the bureaucrats allow that, their political masters should not.
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