Canadian Justice > Same sentence for serial killer as if he just killed one - thanks to Supreme Court of Canada

The Sublime Supreme Court of Canada 

CRUEL AND UNUSUAL, YOU SAY

On Aug. 28, a Winnipeg King’s Bench judge sentenced 37-year-old serial killer Jeremy Skibicki to the only punishment he was empowered by current Canadian law to impose: a life sentence with parole eligibility in 25 years. The next day, Chris Kitching of the Winnipeg Free Press wrote an article observing that nobody in the courtroom was fully satisfied with this outcome, and that Justice Glenn Joyal’s hands were tied by the Supreme Court’s May 2022 Bissonnette ruling, which forbids life sentences for multiple murderers from being “stacked” to advance the date of initial parole hearings.    The mandatory penalty for first-degree murder is life, but genuine and unconditional life imprisonment, the court had ruled unanimously, would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. As a result, Skibicki got the same sentence he would have received for only the first of his killings.    Skibicki’s murders, let it be said, were deliberate and quite carefully, even intelligently, planned. He had an overwhelming sexual paraphilia he called “Sleeping Beauty Syndrome,” which led him to enjoy the violation of unconscious and defenceless women. In pursuit of this pleasure, he targeted homeless shelters in the very early morning, and succeeded over a two-month period in enticing four impoverished Aboriginal women to his apartment, where he drowned or strangled them, defiled the corpses in his bathtub, and dismembered them, disposing of the wrapped remains in the building’s garbage dumpster. He also admitted a racial motivation for his choice of victims, insisting in a confession to police that “extreme desperate measures” were necessary to save the white race and that he was acting on behalf of “Holy Europe.”   Skibicki now becomes eligible for parole in 2047, at which time the families and other loved ones of his victims will have to make the case for continuing to keep him in prison, as if that last paragraph just wasn’t quite enough. As Kitching explains, they find the prospect morally ridiculous and abhorrent, and they’re not looking forward to exercising their painful obligation any more than you would in their shoes.   But they weren’t, of course, alone: reporter Kitching covered his ground very well. The head of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs objected to the sentence. The federal Conservative justice critic objected to it. The interim leader of the Manitoba Progressive Conservatives objected to it. Manitoba’s premier, Wab Kinew, declined to advocate for a change in the Criminal Code — which would almost certainly require use of the notwithstanding clause — but added that Skibicki “can never be free.”    Kinew invoked the “need to respect the judicial branch,” perhaps failing to notice that Justice Joyal himself told Skibicki to his face that the sentence he was required to give “will not adequately reflect the gravity of these offences and your moral culpability.” Meanwhile, a spokesman for the federal justice minister, who might have been expected to take the phone off the metaphorical hook, chipped in with a statement reminding everyone that the government had fought heroically against the defence arguments in Bissonnette in the first place.   Hey, what can you do? It’s not like we’re governed by the government. Just to complete this monument of revolving absurdity, it might be observed that the murderer himself remarked in his confession that “what happens to me (now), it’s like it’s never going to be enough. Even capital punishment.”    He also admitted to having experienced concern after the first three killings that he might face “three life sentences,” which, under Bissonnette, carry no penalty any different from one. Or four. I can’t count the number of clever people who have told me over the years that it’s fine for deterrence to gradually and mysteriously vanish as a principle of murder sentencing, because weirdos like Skibicki always act completely impulsively and never think ahead that far. I’d like to assign those people some homework in the form of Justice Joyal’s verdict, but be warned: it’s not easy reading.    — Colby Cosh

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