BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS

WHY THE COURTS TODAY TAKE SUCH A LENIENT APPROACH TO LAW ENFORCEMENT

There is an explanation for the lenient approach that Canadian judges take to law enforcement today. This was outlined in a public speech given at the Ideas conference on illicit drug use called the International Drug Education and Awareness Symposium held in Vancouver last May. At that conference, retired Judge Wallace Gilby Craig, released from the constraints of the courtroom, where, for 26 years he had served as a provincial court judge in Vancouver, felt free to protest the decline of law and order in Canada in recent years. His speech outlining this decline has been summarized as follows:

… lawyers and judges who lived through or grew up in the Great Depression and the Second World War believed that the criminal law and the criminal justice system must produce law and order, and that violent behaviour was anathema.

Today, we have a new generation of lawyers and judges, too many of whom, it seems to me, see no evil in criminal behaviour and violence, extrapolating into the assessment of an offender and his criminal act, the notion that deep down he is like the rest of us and that his redemption will be lost if he is punished by being sent to jail.

In all courts in British Columbia, there is a growing trend of assiduous concern for the plight of the guilty, in some cases characterization of the perpetrator of a crime as a victim alongside his chosen victim. Punishment is being avoided, even if doing so exacerbates the plight of the victim and lessens public confidence in the criminal justice system. This assiduous concern for a convicted person is not the invocation of mercy as part of the sentencing process - rather, it is a gross distortion of the role of the courts and an avoidance of the due regard and purpose of the criminal law being, at least notionally, to protect law abiding citizens.

Judges frequently fall back on two propositions in allowing evil acts to go unpunished: (1) there is no consequential deterrent value in jail sentences, and (2) that the virtue they find in the offender will be lost if he is put in jail. Further, "the criminal justice system was never designed or intended to heal the suffering of the victims of crime. This reference to victims of crime was put another way recently - " … that a criminal law sentence, whether it be in youth court or adult, was never designed to heal suffering." The measure of a sentence should never intensify what for many victims has been a life sentence imposed on them by a criminal. Each victim is the luckless surrogate of the rest of society, and the suffering of each victim of crime haunts all of us because, but for the grace of God, it could have been us. Each time a criminal is coddled, the predators among us take comfort.

If a jail sentence cannot be avoided, this same generation of judges will resort to equating a lengthy sentence to an act of vengeance and retribution in which they will not participate. Too often do trial judges shy away from jail sentences actually measured against the ferocity of the case. Those judges who are not afraid to grasp the nettle of sentencing, however, know that even though thy have listened to witnesses and considered the gravity of the facts, a sentence measured against the cruelty of the offender will be viewed on appeal as harsh and excessive unless it falls within ordained limits set by the Court of Appeal.

Yet we are confronted with increasingly serious acts of individual or gang violence, trafficking in hard drugs, and property crime. If the reality in our city is that crime pays and is without punishment, then the criminal justice system is truly a tattered scarecrow. (Emphasis ours.)

In short, our very liberal judges in Canada seem to have great concerns for the rights and protections of the accused, but seem far less concerned about the victims who, in the case of child pornography, are innocent children.

This is the whirlwind we are reaping from the "rights and equality" culture that has been both promoted and strengthened by our so-called Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which, because victims are not the object of court cases, is never invoked to protect their rights and freedoms.

BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS