Why Canada is unwilling to put even its most heinous murderers permanently behind bars
February 12, 2019
"Together, the crimes of Bruce McArthur and Alexandre Bissonnette extinguished up to 510 years of human life and guaranteed decades of nightmares and trauma among the shattered communities they targeted.
There was federal legislation and even judicial precedent to ensure that both men would be guaranteed to die in prison. And yet, on Friday judges in two provinces ruled otherwise, even going so far as to unilaterally rewrite legislation to do so.
The fate of McArthur and Bissonnette may be the most glaring example yet that there is no crime heinous enough in Canada to stop a killer from one day being able to regain their freedom....
As convicted murderers, Bissonnette and McArthur both received automatic “life sentences.” In the Canadian context, however, a “life sentence” doesn’t mean “life in prison.” All it means is that if they’re ever released, their parole never expires....
It’s Canadian law that a judge is supposed to factor “retribution” into their sentencing. “Retribution is an accepted, and indeed important, principle of sentencing in our criminal law,” reads a 1996 Supreme Court decision.
As the ruling explained, sentencing shouldn’t only be about reform or public safety, it should also reflect a “society’s condemnation” of a crime.
Judge John McMahon acknowledged as much when sentencing McArthur, even saying it would be “symbolic” if the murderer was ordered to a jail term that would keep him locked up until he was 116 years old.
Nevertheless, since McArthur had pled guilty and was already of advanced age, McMahon ruled it overkill. “There is a fine line between retribution … and vengeance,” he wrote....
One overarching factor with Canadian sentencing is that it’s inconsistent. Canada has a loose set of sentencing principles, but it’s ultimately up to individual discretion on how those get applied.
“To be perfectly frank, I find sentencing very murky; we kind of dress it up with these legal concepts and try to pretend we’re engaged in some highly analytical quasi-scientific process of fine-grained moral measurement, but when it comes down to it, people have wildly divergent views of what an appropriate sentence is,” Penney said.
In either the Bissonnette or McArthur case, “you give it to another judge and maybe you get a 75 year sentence.”
For one thing, had McArthur or Bissonnette committed their crimes in Western Canada, they probably would be guaranteed to die in prison. Although all criminal courts follow the same Criminal Code, those in Canada’s higher-crime western provinces generally hand out stiffer sentences than those in Quebec and Ontario...."
Why Canada is unwilling to put even its most heinous murderers permanently behind bars
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