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Canada's justice system is absurdly inadequate
NP Platformed
— Colby Cosh
May 11, 2023
A FAILURE OF PROFESSIONAL SUPPORT
This morning, more or less on time, citizens of Edmonton received a tattered, incomplete package of personal details about the person suspected of having randomly slain a mother and an 11-year-old child at a school playground on Saturday. Edmonton police won’t officially disclose the name of the suspect, who is in hospital full of their lead and on life support; he hasn’t been charged yet.
But at this time in history, it has become the convention — after crimes of an especially revolting random character — for someone in our system of criminal justice to become dimly conscious of the public’s need to know, if not their own personal participation in a catastrophe, and to supply a skilled reporter like CBC’s Paige Parsons with juuuust enough information to reconstruct an illuminating record of awful violence and the pathetic penal response it received.
I say the record is “illuminating,” but of course it merely confirms what anyone who is not a judge might have guessed about the background to Edmonton’s latest human sacrifice. Muorater Mashar, if Parsons’ dope is solid, was found guilty of a series of Edmonton robberies in late 2009. After serving his sentence, Mashar stabbed someone in the heart at a bus stop in Manitoba. He did about three years in custody, apparently the going rate for a felon who tries to empty a transit user’s aorta, and was released with conditions, “including being seen by a psychologist and a psychiatrist.”
With such a powerful mental-health Voltron working on him, it’s almost inconceivable that he could reoffend, but he tested positive for methamphetamine. Nevertheless, he ended up back in Edmonton within a few months, ringing up more convictions for crimes against persons and property — including at least one physical attack on a child (in a public-transit setting, of course).
We have that particular niblet of fact only by virtue of Edmonton police Chief Dale McFee’s passing mention at a Monday press conference, where he explained how this nightmarish double murder definitely doesn’t reflect badly on the cops — which I suppose we all know it probably doesn’t. (They did a good job of keeping the body count low.) “There were multiple intervention points,” McFee observed, “multiple opportunities to hold the suspect accountable and provide him the professional support required to manage his behaviour. But the system once again failed.”
McFee’s politician language kinda makes one wonder if the system did fail according to its own purposes. Instinctively, he sees the butchering of a mother and child as a failure to provide sufficient “professional support” for the butcher. The only purpose that can be fathomed or articulated for criminal justice, even by a cop, is therapeutic. The failure of the justice system to protect innocent lives is essentially … managerial in nature, I guess? We just have to seal up those notorious bureaucratic “cracks” that habitually violent maniacs keep falling through.
This is the failed operating philosophy of Canadian “justice”; any resemblance to brain damage is coincidence. I am sure McFee has feelings that it would cost him his job to express — and come to think of it, I do too. What I will observe is that the public character of criminal justice has now been virtually destroyed thanks to lunatic “privacy” obsessions. In this environment of total obscurity, judges have obviously lost even the most minimal sense that punishments ought to compound — perhaps exponentially — according to the track record of a convict.
It's not unusual in Canada, and even in some states, for criminals to rack-up several dozens of 'break and enter' convictions and yet, get a few weeks or months in jail for each one. Successive crimes of a similar nature should result in the doubling of sentences from the previous.
It also occurs to me that we could perhaps have a system of gentle space-utopia criminal punishments if there were any meaningful consequences attached to the “conditions of release” that judges scribble like Rupi Kaur poems. Maybe we don’t want to chain mere convicted robbers to cinder blocks and throw them in the river, even if it would mean that a few kids later survive to see adulthood or that transit users don’t have to run a gauntlet of knives to get to the mall. But could we have a system, could we imagine a system, that enforces court orders with a touch of rigour, as if the state cared to defend the legitimacy of its monopoly on retaliation? That legitimacy is a finite quantity, and it is trickling out very fast. Almost as if its vessel had been wounded. Repeatedly.
Canada's justice system is criminal-centric, as I suppose it must be. However, it is so at the expense of law-abiding Canadians, and, as usual, it is women and children who suffer the consequences of the courts' gentleness with criminals. Judges seem completely oblivious to this.
One aspect of this case was not addressed by the personal history of Mashar. Was he a Muslim? If he was, that would surely be pertinent to the case unless you can completely ignore the daily rapes and murders committed in Europe by migrant Muslims. They have a motive built right into the Quran by Mohammed himself. "I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers, smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them. It is not ye who slew them; it was God." Surah 8:13-17.
The other aspect, barely mentioned in this article is drugs. Mashar was found with meth in his system while out on bail, apparently. Drugs are a motive in themselves, a madness of complete loss of self-control. In some courts this is seen as a mitigating factor, but should always be an aggravating factor.
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