Canadian Justice > Murderer, rapist, violent offender released on parole in BC - what stupidity!

 

‘Baffling’: B.C. murderer who killed

university student granted day parole

By Darrian Matassa-Fung  Global News

Posted March 9, 2024 2:42 pm

 1 min read

The man who was convicted of murdering a University of Victoria student in 1987 has been granted day parole.

In January 1987, UVIC student Marguerite Telesford went missing. Her body was never found, but evidence led to the conviction of Scott Mackay for her murder. Mackay is serving a life sentence for his conviction.

The convicted killer is also a person of interest in another unsolved homicide case and has been convicted for two attacks on sex trade workers.

Now, Mackay has been granted six months of day parole, after six unsuccessful applications, despite the parole board saying Mackay has a high risk for “violent reoffending.”

Victim rights advocate Dave Teixeira is calling the decision “baffling.”

“He has not demonstrated remorse, or cooperation, in the long term to bring closure to this family and it seems in many cases, parole boards and review boards lean towards letting someone out after a certain amount of time because they’ve ‘earned it’ and it proves their systems are working,” Teixeira told Global News.

“It seems to be another instance that a parole board is disregarding the safety of Canadians.”

Exactly, who is going to take responsibility for the first girl he murders?

The board said it found that Mackay would not present an undue risk to society while on day parole, referencing his 25 years of sobriety and completion of programs.

Mackay has numerous conditions including a 10 p.m. curfew and a ban from consuming alcohol and drugs. He also must report all relationships and friendships with women to his parole supervisor.

As to where Mackay will be released, it is unclear as that information was redacted from the decision.

Wow! That should give him a head-start in selecting his next victim. Good grief! Canada's justice system is soooo criminal centric and so completely ignores the safety of women and girls in society.

Canadian Convulsions > Canada's Frightening 'Online Harms Act'

 

This legislation is desperately needed for the protection of children online. In 9.5 years of government, the Trudeau Liberals have done absolutely nothing for the protection of children from sexual predators. It's disappointing but not surprising that they would use this bill to gain even more control over the media than they alreay have, and they have a disturbing amount of control already. I wish that just for once, Trudeau would do something to protect children from paedophiles without political games involved.

Canada's Frightening 'Online Harms Act'

Tara MacIsaac Senior Reporter tara@epochtimes.ca

The Online Harms Act introduced this week raised many red flags for lawyers. A prime example: Someone could report you for online hate crimes they merely “fear” you might commit, and if a judge agrees the fear is reasonable, you might end up wearing an electronic bracelet for a year and living under a court-ordered curfew. If you don’t comply with the restrictions, you could be sentenced to a year in prison.

Online Harms Act Red Flags

The Liberal government tabled its Online Harms Act, Bill C-63, on Feb. 26, and lawyers and analysts have since been fervently reviewing and commenting on it.    The bill would have broad impacts on how online content, and speech in general, is handled in Canada. It has received praise, such as for its strong protections against child exploitation. But many have found its hate speech provisions especially alarming.    “The balance between protecting vulnerable people on the internet and egregiously infringing on free speech and expression is a delicate one,” said columnist Cory Morgan.   Some key points:    It targets seven harms: sexually victimizing children, bullying, inducing child to harm themselves, extremism/terrorism, inciting violence, fomenting hatred, and intimate content without consent including deep fakes.   While some are fairly objective, the concern is how the more subjective harms—such as “fomenting hatred” or “inciting violence”—are judged.    It seeks to amend the Criminal Code to:    - Increase penalties for hate crimes. For example, “advocating for genocide” could come with a lifetime sentence. “That means words alone could lead to life imprisonment,” said the Canadian Constitution Foundation in a Feb. 27 press release.   - Add the provision regarding “fear” that someone will commit a “hate propaganda offence or hate crime.”   - “Far more draconian than being arrested for something you say, is being imprisoned for something someone else is afraid you’ll say,” lawyer Marty Moore told The Epoch Times.   - Create a standalone offence for crimes “motivated by hatred.” Currently, in a murder or assault case for example, “hate motivation” is only an aggravating factor considered by a judge during sentencing. Now, it would be a standalone offence police could charge from the outset, and it’s “liable to imprisonment for life.”   It seeks to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act to reinstate a “hate speech” provision that was removed about a decade ago because it caused an uproar over impacts on free speech.    It will allow a government-appointed human rights tribunal to rule on some cases of hate speech (it creates a new class of hate speech below the criminal threshold judged by the courts).   The tribunal could fine people up to $50,000 and require payment to the complainant up to $20,000. The complainant does not have to be identified in all cases—so the accused may never know who has filed the complaint.   “Findings would be based on a mere ‘balance of probabilities’ standard rather than the criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The subjectivity of defining ‘hate speech’ will lead to punishments for protected speech. The mere threat of human rights complaints will chill large amounts of protected speech,” CCF said.    “It’s pretty cheap to lay a complaint. It doesn’t cost you anything. And if it doesn’t even cost you your identity, you can just go ahead and do that to all of your political opponents,” Mr. Moore said.   It creates a Digital Safety Commission made up of three to five commissioners appointed by the government (parliamentarians would vote on who heads it). It would be largely responsible for enforcing the law, and many have said it would have far too much power.    It could send inspectors into a person’s workplace to look at documents without a warrant (entering someone’s home would still require a warrant). It could make online content inaccessible, hold hearings (sometimes out of public view), and more.    “Despite those powers, the Commission is not subject to any legal or technical rules of evidence,” said University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law, in a post on his website.   “We are talking about some of the most draconian powers given to an agency that doesn’t exist and has no track record of integrity,” Mr. Moore says.    “One troubling aspect of Bill C-63 is the vast authority bestowed upon a newly established body, comprising government appointees, to interpret the law, make up new rules, enforce them, and then serve as judge, jury, and executioner,” said Canadian Civil Liberties Association director and general counsel Noa Mendelsohn Aviv.    It also creates the position of a digital safety ombudsperson to act as a guide and advocate for internet users, and a digital safety office to support the commission and the ombudsperson.   It places requirements on social media companies (such as Facebook) to flag content that they believe “foments hatred” and deal with content they have “reasonable grounds to believe … [poses] a risk of significant psychological or physical harm.”    Failure to abide by the requirements could cost the platforms 6 percent of their gross global revenue or $10 million, whichever is greater.   “This appears aimed at encouraging social media companies to censor speech that the government cannot outlaw,” CCF said.

Justice Minister and Attorney General of Canada Arif Virani arrives to a cabinet meeting on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Feb. 27, 2024. (The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick)

Why It Matters: Who will decide what “hate speech” is?    Previously, the province’s attorneys general had to be consulted before a hate speech charge could be laid. A lot rested on high-level legal expertise to determine what “hate speech” is.   Under Bill C-63, police could lay those charges, said CCF lawyer Josh Dehaas in an email to The Epoch Times.   Your average Canadian can also initiate an onerous legal process for anyone he or she thinks may be guilty of hate speech—by filing a complaint to the human rights commission or by going to the courts with it.    Social media companies are required to discern what they believe is harmful, and the digital commission is too.    One of the main criticisms Opposition Leader Pierre Poilieve has leveled at the legislation is that the Liberal government could use it to define “hate speech” as whatever speech it doesn’t like   Justice Minister Arif Virani was asked to respond to this criticism in a Feb. 26 interview with Michael Serapio of PrimeTime Politics.   “We’re talking about codifying [a] pre-existing definition of hatred,” Mr. Virani told Mr. Serapio.   “Hatred has been defined in Supreme Court jurisprudence for at least the last 11 years in a decision called Whatcott, 2013, where it talks about something that arises to ‘detestation’ and ‘vilification.’ It doesn’t cover things like humiliating, offensive comments, things that are insulting.”   Mr. Dehaas noted, however, the Whatcott decision lays out a confusing definition of hate speech. That’s why the attorney general is asked to evaluate the cases, Mr. Dehaas said in a post on X.    The Whatcott case was about a man in Saskatchewan who distributed flyers about homosexuality. He spoke of “sodomy” from a Christian perspective and said it shouldn’t be presented to public school children. The manner in which he expressed these views was deemed “hate speech” by the Supreme Court of Canada.   Given the current widespread commentary on how gender and sexuality are treated in schools, Canadians may be hard-pressed to know where the line is between hate speech and voicing concerns.    “It’s difficult for me, a lawyer who works on free expression cases, to know exactly where the line is between protected speech and hate speech,” Mr. Dehaas said in a CCF release. “If this bill passes, I suspect many Canadians will now be too afraid of a human rights complaint to participate in policy debates around things like race, religion and gender.”     The bill also follows on other recent legislation giving the government regulatory powers over online content.    For example the Online Streaming Act (formerly Bill C-11) gives the government greater control over streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify. The Online News Act (formerly Bill C-18) requires tech companies to pay for Canadian news content on their platforms (and has led Meta to ban Canadian news links).      What’s ahead: The bill will make its way through Parliament, and it may be amended to address some of the concerns being raised. In the months to come, it will likely remain a focal point for debate over free expression and government control over the internet.  ===================================================================

Canadian Justice > Repatriated ISIS Bride not allowed to make bombs for 8 months

..

Canada: ISIS bride freed, but can’t possess

bomb-making instructions for eight months

NOV 9, 2023 4:30 PM BY ROBERT SPENCER

That’ll fix everything. Surely within eight months, this Islamic State jihadi will have learned to become a loyal, stable, productive member of Canadian society. It probably won’t even take that long!

B.C. woman who married ISIS fighter, repatriated from Syrian camp

granted peace bond

Canadian Press, November 8, 2023:

CHILLIWACK — A judge has placed a terrorism peace bond on a B.C. woman who was repatriated to Canada last year from a Syrian prison camp after she married an ISIS fighter.

Chilliwack provincial court Judge Kristen Mundstock ruled Kimberly Polman must follow several conditions while under bond, including reporting to a parole officer, remaining at her current Squamish address, wearing electronic supervision equipment and not leaving the province.

The order also includes conditions that Polman have no contact with several people, such as her ex-husband, that she not drive vehicle except an electronic bike and that she not communicate with anyone suspected to be involved in terrorism.

“You must not possess any knives or any other sharp-bladed instrument used, designed to be used, or intended to be used to cut things,” the order said of another condition facing Polman. “The exceptions are: A. You can possess a knife when preparing and eating food. B. You can possess these items inside the place where you live and regularly sleep.

“You shall not possess any information, electronic or otherwise, that explains how to make or use an explosive substance.”

The court order is effective as of Tuesday and will last for eight months.

Polman and another woman were returned to Canada in a year ago from the detention camp in Syria that is holding mostly women and children who were rounded up after the fall of the extremist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an al-Qaida splinter group.

She was arrested on her return to Canada but had been out on bail pending the bond decision, which, if breached, could result in a prison sentence….

Of course, we know what ISIS people are like, they can surely be counted on to honour the conditions of a peace bond, unless they are busy cutting someone's head off. 

Canadian Justice > Killer back on the streets after serving 2 years of an 8 year sentence; Federal Bill on Bail looks completely useless

..

Barbara Kentner has been failed again, says family after

murderer gets day parole in trailer-hitch death

First Nation victim's family says they weren't told man convicted 

in her Thunder Bay death was up for parole

Sarah Law · CBC News · Posted: Sep 19, 2023 1:00 AM PDT | 

A collage of photos of Barbara Kentner, who was 34 when she died months after being struck by a trailer hitch in Thunder Bay, Ont. (Jody Porter/CBC)

WARNING: This story contains disturbing details of violence against Indigenous women.

Melissa Kentner is angry.

The man convicted of manslaughter in the death of her sister, Barbara Kentner, has been released from prison on day parole after serving two years of an eight-year sentence.

"I was crying that day when I found out," Melissa said in an interview with CBC News. "I was having a [really] bad panic attack, like I thought I was going to have a heart attack."

Barbara, of Wabigoon Lake First Nation, died on July 4, 2017, in Thunder Bay, Ont., from medical complications, months after she was struck by a trailer hitch. She was 34 — a mother, a sister, a cousin and an aunt. Her death made national news in a country facing a crisis of violence against Indigenous women, girls and gender-diverse people.

Brayden Bushby, now 24, was sentenced in June 2021 to eight years in prison for Barbara's death. Due to time already served, that was reduced to seven years and 11 months.

So, it seems he spent only one month in prison before being convicted.

...Brayden Bushby was sentenced to an eight-year sentence for manslaughter after throwing a trailer hitch at Kentner's sister Barbara from a passing car.

This Aug. 10, Bushby was granted day parole, but was denied full parole, according to documents from the Parole Board of Canada.

He has been ordered:

Not to consume, purchase or possess alcohol.

Not to enter establishments where the primary source of income is derived from the sale or consumption of alcohol.

To have no direct or indirect contact with the victim's immediate family.

To follow the treatment plan/program arranged by his parole supervisor in the areas of substance abuse and emotions.

Before his day parole release, Bushby tried to appeal his sentence. Court of Appeal documents obtained by CBC News show his lawyers argued for either his manslaughter conviction to be withdrawn and replaced with a charge of aggravated assault, or for the court to order a retrial on the manslaughter charge.

However, the parole board documents indicate Bushby is no longer pursuing the appeal.

Melissa said nobody told her about Bushby's parole release and she learned about it through the neighbour of one of Bushby's relatives.

For much more on this story, please go to: Victim notification issues

The Canadian government is proposing a bill to make bail for repeat violent offenders more difficult. Good for them! But I have been waiting for 8 years for this government to legislate something, anything, that will benefit children who are being sexually abused. From what I can see, this bill doesn't address this issue at all except possibly in very extreme cases. Trudeau has avoided the subject for his entire time in office.

B.C. attorney general hails federal bail bill restricting release

of violent offenders as it goes to Senate

Passing of C-48 in Commons a step toward safer communities, Niki Sharma says

Chad Pawson · CBC News · Posted: Sep 19, 2023 11:45 AM PDT | 

Niki Sharma pictured being sworn in as B.C. attorney general on Dec. 7, 2022. (Mike McArthur/CBC News)

British Columbia's attorney general says the passing of a bill that places a "reverse onus" on offenders to be released on bail is "one step closer" to meaningful reform intended to increase community safety.

Bill C-48 passed its third reading in the House of Commons on Monday, the day parliamentarians returned for the fall session, and will now go for review to the Senate.

Provinces including B.C., as well as law enforcement and advocates have been pressuring Ottawa over bail reform for more than a year, following crimes where suspects or those charged had a history of violence but were out on bail.

"Today we moved one step closer to ensuring safer communities across Canada, including here in B.C.," said Attorney General Niki Sharma in a statement from her office.

Bill C-48 would amend the Criminal Code so that those charged with a serious violent offence involving a weapon — one with a maximum penalty of 10 years' imprisonment — who were convicted of a similar offence within the last five years will face a reverse onus to get bail.

So, if they were sentenced to 10 years or more in jail for the first crime, they couldn't possibly qualify as being convicted of a similar offence in the last 5 years. 

How many people would this bill have affected if it had been applied 5 years ago?

This means the accused has to show why they should be released instead of the prosecution having to prove that they should remain behind bars.

The law expands the use of reverse onus for firearm and intimate partner violence offences, and allows courts to take into consideration community safety and an accused's history of violence when making a bail decision.

Does that mean that they don't normally consider community safety in their decisions?  I've always suspected that as it seemed apparent. 

Under the law, a person accused of a crime is presumed innocent until they are proven guilty. Granting them bail means they can remain out of jail while their case moves through the justice system — a process that can take many months.

As with the story above, Bushby appears to have spent only one month in cells before his conviction. This law wouldn't change that because he had no previous conviction/sentence of 10 years or more.

Under the Criminal Code, a person has the right to a bail hearing within 24 hours of their arrest if a judge or justice of the peace is available, or as soon as possible once someone become available.

If they are denied bail, they will remain in custody. The financial cost of keeping an accused person in jail is far greater than the cost of supervising them in the community while they await trial.

In changing bail reforms, federal regulators said they also had to balance keeping offenders in custody against previous legislative changes that tried to be sensitive to Indigenous or Black people, who are over-represented in the criminal justice system.

Is it possible that they are over-represented in the criminal system?

Not complete fix, critics say

But critics say Bill C-48 doesn't go far enough. 

South Surrey MLA Elenore Sturko, B.C. United critic for mental health and addictions, said it doesn't deal with smaller violations such as petty crimes like theft or street disorder.

Notice how "mental health and addictions" seem to always be paired together? There is no doubt that the extreme wave of mental health problems is related to two societal problems - drug use and child sexual abuse. Governments, both provincial and federal don't seem to be very interested in either topic.

"These will not touch those bail hearings because they don't fit within the new categories," said Sturko, who is a former Mountie.

Sturko also said while it waits on federal bail reform Premier David Eby's B.C. government could have been doing more to address "complex and overlapping mental-health and addictions crises," which are often the root causes of crime.

Angela Marie MacDougall, director of Battered Women's Support Services, said bail reform shouldn't be the first step in addressing intimate partner violence. 

"The vast majority of victims do not report to the police, they report to friends and family … to anti-violence organizations, and that's actually where the investment needs to be," she said.

B.C. government to open dedicated enforcement hubs targeting repeat violent offenders

Sharma said in her statement that she would continue to advocate for further changes, but did not define what those would be.

"The premier and I, along with the solicitor general and colleagues from across Canada, continue to push for federal action on bail reform," her statement said.

In the spring, the province said it would create hubs made up of police, dedicated prosecutors and probation officers to target repeat violent offenders across the province. 

The 12 hubs are part of the Repeat Violent Offending Intervention Initiative, which the province says focuses on targeted enforcement and enhanced investigation and monitoring.

============================================================================================

Canadian Justice > Resembling Far-left Scandinavian Justice more than the English Justice of its Heritage

..

LOOKING INTO THE BLACK MIRROR 

This morning I was reading the news from a far-off, little-known country with a brutish right-wing government. One of the local rags gives a hair-raising account of developments in policing as the country faces theft, violence and urban disorder problems like those which are spreading fast in happy, civilized Canada.

The headline is: “Build prisons to fit shoplifters, minister suggests.” 

 

The minister in question is a mere undersecretary for transport, but he came out swinging in a radio interview, warning that his government intends to require mandatory prison sentences for repeat offenders who commit shoplifting, burglary, theft or assault.  

These crimes, our rabid authoritarian friend insists, inflict enormous harm if they’re allowed to spiral out of control: “If people are persistently breaking the law, then they should go to jail. And if we need to build more prison places for them, then so be it.” 

Chilling words indeed. Our story then turns to the country’s minister responsible for prisons, who is busy with other dystopian law and order measures this week. On Monday, plans were leaked to have police chiefs throughout this country explicitly promise to investigate every property crime for which a reasonable lead exists “after years of overlooking lower-level offences such as criminal damage, shoplifting, car and bike theft.”  

Meanwhile, the prisons boss has ordered regional cops to make much heavier use of facial-recognition software — which, in turn, turns out to be pervasively used already in large retail stores, with the approval of the country’s information commissioner. (When a “known” shoplifter is caught on camera in these places, a staff member politely approaches and asks if they need any help. This turns out to reduce not only shoplifting itself, but violence against store employees.) 

You’ve probably figured out that this wretched land is none other than the United Kingdom — or, strictly speaking, since we’re mostly talking about criminal justice, England and Wales. The striving, humble local newspaper reporting on murmured ministerial thoughts is the Times of London.  

England is the place we imported our entire constitution from, and we did it wholesale, but almost every sentence of the Times story makes you suddenly conscious of our frantic flight toward Scandinavian justice policy and away from our own past. 

Could a politician here state flatly that “Persistent lawbreakers should be jailed” without raising howls of outrage? Probably not, but what’s truly uncanny is the assumption by an elected official — transport undersecretary Richard Holden — that criminal sentencing is within his government’s control and can be adjusted to address innovations and changes in crime.  

Moreover, he takes the deterrent function of incarceration — an idea that Canadian law has substantially disavowed — for granted. Can these monsters really be our cousins? 

Holden does what no Canadian can anymore, as we observed last week: he considers pervasive urban property crime as an economic problem with a “huge impact.” And he seems willing to consider a long rap sheet to be an indication of a convict’s devotion to criminal behaviour, rather than a signal of morally elevating victimhood or eligibility for reparations.  

England already has a “two strikes” law for knife crimes, which is something it is hard to imagine passing muster in Canadian courts: indeed, the English judges, as if to remind us of our lingering family connection, are doing their best to ignore it. But they haven’t done what Canadian appellate courts would almost certainly do — devise a hallucinatory pretext to declare the whole law “cruel and unusual” or otherwise contrary to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. 

One keeps reading the Times piece waiting for someone to swoop in and warn of disproportionate racial impacts from these policies. Even the people who recommend them might be expected to add a little woke boilerplate to their law-and-order snarling, but it doesn’t happen. And while Britain already has a reputation for tolerating high levels of technological surveillance, it doesn’t seem to discourage its leaders from doubling down and embracing the use of automated facial recognition. 

Of course this is all coming from a desperate Conservative government facing electoral annihilation, but the politicians aren’t saying these things because they expect the measures and the trial balloons to be unpopular or to generate indignant liberal reaction. They expect them to appeal to the law-abiding working poor who are directly in the line of fire from low-level violence and unchecked criminal predation.  

We are, I think, well overdue to have such a political dialogue — but, then again, it is not clear that a Canadian government of any stripe could actually enact any of these measures if it wanted to. 

— Colby Cosh

NP Platformed

We certainly couldn't enact such measures as long as the Mainstream Press is owned by the Liberals.

============================================================================================

Canadian Justice > The absurd inadequacy of Canadian Justice in protecting innocent citizens

..

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.

=============================================================================================

Canadian Justice > Protecting his home and family gets man charged with murder

..

This is another insane case of Canada's criminal-centric laws gone mad.

Ontario Man Charged With Murder for Shooting Home Intruder

Attacking His Mother: Lawyer

A patch on the arm of a Halton Regional Police officer on Feb. 18, 2021.  (Halton Police Photo)

By Tara MacIsaac

February 23, 2023Updated: February 24, 2023

A 22-year-old Ontario man is charged with second-degree murder for allegedly killing one of five people who entered his home, likely to rob it, say police.

Ali Mian of Milton shot the intruder only once and did not intend to kill, his lawyer told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.

“[Mian], who lives at home with his single mother, shot at an intruder that broke into his home and attacked his mother,” criminal lawyer Jag Virk said. “He is a registered firearm owner and used his gun legally against an armed intruder. He shouldn’t be charged with murder for protecting his mother.”

The break-in occurred on Feb. 19 at about 5 a.m. on Gibson Crescent.

Police have not identified the deceased. One man was charged with breaking and entering, 20-year-old Romario Clarke of Oshawa. Clarke was also charged with unauthorized possession of a firearm.

A white vehicle Halton Police say was likely used for three suspects to escape after a failed robbery in Milton, Ont.,

on Feb. 19, 2023. (Halton Regional Police)

Limits of Self-Defence

Two cases in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in recent months also involved the death of alleged home invaders.

Halifax Regional Police said two men were invading a home when the occupant confronted them and fatally stabbed one of them, on Dec. 30, 2022. The deceased’s name is Anthony Robert Herritt.

“Is it considered self-defence? … That term is a difficult thing to consider,” spokesperson Const. John MacLeod told reporters, according to Global News.

“What our investigators need to do is look at the evidence before them, gather up all the information they have and determine whether or not charges would be appropriate. And in this case, at this time, our investigators are not considering any charges.”

The second case occurred on Jan. 4, when a 33-year-old man was fatally shot. The man, along with two others, had invaded a home. One of the three was armed, police said, and when a struggle ensued with the occupants, the gun went off.

According to sections 34 and 35 of the Criminal Code, a person is not guilty of an offence in defending himself and his property, but only under certain conditions.

Those include that the act “is reasonable in the circumstances.” The Code lists eight considerations in determining what is “reasonable.” They include the nature of the threat, to what extend(sic) the threat was imminent, and if other means were available to respond to the threat.

As if in a home invasion situation, you are going to weigh the different response possibilities while your mother is being attacked!!! What madness!

When someone invades another's home, they should surrender all rights, even to life itself. A person whose home is invaded, and whose family is threatened, should not have to worry about the rights of the invader. 

The Canadian Press contributed to this report.