It was not an oversight, it was the deliberate selection of a word which I felt to be perfectly appropriate to the situation. However, argument about my word selection distracted from what I feel to be the main point of the OP, so I changed it. That does not mean that I feel my original word selection to be in error.
Fair enough. With that I can agree to disagree. However, we cannot yet say that
He is ALLEGED to have committed that act, which is what the trial is for.
That’s probably the crux of it. I have no faith that he will experience due process.
Well, I don’t differentiate this man from the others. They all should have had either full and proper treatment under the Geneva Convention or they should have been tried in our courts. If the man was innocent, he should have had a chance to prove it, but if guilty I don’t see where the 15 year old should have been treated much different from the others imprisoned in these (to me) illegal camps.
I do not consider a 15 year old combatant to be a child and I do not support is long term imprisonment without a trial and due process or full treatment under the Geneva Convention. I said as much I believe in my first post.
I do object to your title that puts this in the worse light possible. Now I only head this story on NPR and I have not studied it, but this does not appear to be an innocent child but rather a teen that was following his Dad’s lead in combat against his own country and his country’s close ally. My sympathy for him as a child is non-existent. He was a full fledge enemy combatant despite his age. I hope he gets his trial soon and I hope he is treated as an enemy soldier. If this means he should be released, so be it. If it means they should continue to hold him but treat him as a proper POW that is also fine.
I think you went too far in calling this torture and may have missed the bigger issue at the same time. The US is not holding him and his fellow prisoners in a way that is acceptable!
Of course. He is alleged to have committed the act.
If this had happened in, say, Billings, Montana, then there’d be no question that his detention before trial was appropriate: it’s a long-settled rule that bail may be denied for capital offenses.
Your concern about his getting due process is not crazy, but at the same time, I think it’s premature, since he has yet to be tried.
Prisoners awaiting trial IN CANADA frequently wait years for their trials; there are people in detention centres in Toronto who’ve been there five years and more. The ugly truth is that we can’t criticize someone else for pulling the same shit we do.
And there’s no evidence Khadr has been tortured, so the title of the OP is deliberately misleading.
There is public information that he was a member of the “frequent flyer program”, whereby he was over a period of many weeks never in the same room for more than 3 hrs, and thus was sleep deprived prior to interviews.
It seems sleep deprivation is a somewhat grey area, verging on torture, but may not be accepted as torture. To quote an online piece about SD “It has been known for a long time that sleep has a detrimental effect; something used to good effect by the military for generations. The ancient Romans, for example, used tormentum vigilae (waking torture) to extract information from their enemies.”
I protest your use of the loaded term “young offender” - Khadr wasn’t stealing cars in downtown Toronto - he was lobbing grenades at American soldiers in Afghanistan. I don’t think his age should be taken into account here, either - at 15 he was old enough to kill two American soldiers. Maybe the person who should have taken his age into account was his own father who put him in this position. His father knew that the consequences were death or indefinite imprisonment by the Americans they were fighting - the Americans haven’t exactly been keeping the Patriot Acts and Guantanamo Bay a secret.
Please provide a cite for any young offenders who have been in pre-trial custody in Canada for five years due to systemic delay. I have never heard of any at all.
As far as accused persons having lengthy pre-trial custody goes, please keep in mind the discretionary 2 for 1 reduction of sentence length typically made in consideration of pre-trial custody when the delay is not caused by the accused (meaning, for example, that if an accused spent a couple of years in jail waiting for a trial due to a slow process, and was sentenced to five years, he usually would only have to spend a further year in prison rather than five years). This leads to people who are facing time and have a poor defence playing the system as best they can to delay the trial, provided that they can stall without being called on it. That way when they go down, they will not end up spending as much time in the klink.
Also please keep in mind that for a person with a poor defence, often it makes more sense to hang about in jail waiting for witnesses to wander off or for memories to fade, rather than to go to trial and go down in flames.
Once you weed out cases where the accused is in a better position by sitting in pre-trial custody than going to trial, I think you’ll be very hard pressed to come up with any that spend half a dozen years honestly waiting for trial.
Unless he is brought back to Canada as a prisoner of war, he can only be dealt with as a young offender under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, s. 14. That is the governing legislation. It applies based on the age of the accused at the time of the commission of the offence, not on how vile the offence was.
The loading of the term I used is in the word “offender”, for under the Act he is not a “young offender”, but instead is a “young person”. YCJA s.2:
How does this help someone acquitted of the charges? It’s a disgrace.
Now, I’m not defending the treatment of Omar Khadr, who no matter what he did or didn’t do deserves a trial, but let’s not pretend this is something it isn’t.
Now let’s have a look at what would happen to Khadr if he were to be returned to Canada for a trial. I expect that he would be kicked loose for delay and/or mistreatment while in detention, but even if he were not and instead were convicted, he would end up with time served on the 2 for 1 plan or eligible for parole either immediately or shortly thereafter. Obviously it is not a simple matter, but given that there has been extreme delay particularly with regard to the accused’s age, and that the delay was used by the state to interrogate the prisoner using improper means considered to be torture by the UN (sleep deprivation), I think that there is a good chance that a Canadian court might toss the matter out for delay. If Khadr were brought back to Canada for trial, the following would apply:
Usually (but not always) a convict is credited with pre-sentence time on a 2 for 1 basis, so in this instance in which the accused has been in custody for 6 years, 12 years would normally be knocked off the sentence.
Even if the accused were found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment such that the 2 for 1 plan would not be applicable, he would likely eligible for parole either immediately or shortly thereafter, for parole eligibility begins after five years (or up to seven years if so ordered by a judge) if the crime was committed by a person under 16 (C.C. s. 745.1 and s. 746.1(3)).
In other words, if the Court did not buy the argument that his pre-trial confinement was excessive and in violation of our Charter of Rights, and if the Court did not buy the argument that he was brainwashed by his parents, there would still be a probability that if he were convicted he would either be out on 2 for 1 time, be eligible for parole, or shortly be eligible for parole. When one considers that the American military tribunal is suspect in its impartiality and is not applying young offender type law, one realizes why Khadr has better odds in Canada.
Yo9u didn’t, however, we are discussing a person who if he were brought back to Canada would be tried as a young person.
The 2 for 1 ploy is not used by people who have much of a chance at being acquitted. It is used by people who expect to be going down but who wish to minimize their time in custody significantly. Other than people who have had their cases tossed for delay or for lack of witnesses, please provide me with cites setting out people who have been acquitted after five or more years of pre-trial custody.
