So this fucking waste of oxygen (who, by the way, has 51 previous criminal convictions) gets drunk, takes his little girls outside without winter clothes, is so out of it he loses them and they freeze to death outside while he makes it to his destination all warm and toasty.
I say the asshole is getting off easy because the Crown is only pursuing 2.5-5 years.
Because he wants to ‘change his life’ and had an addiction, he gets a sentencing circle made up of people from the community. Except that, you know, on the reserve the community is in the same situation. It’s pretty general knowledge around here that you get off easier with one.
That is a good question. Along with how in the hell does someone get 51 convictions while only being 25 years old? Assuming that Canada, like the US, only counts convictions starting at age 18*, then the guy has been arrested and convicted 7 times a year.
It doesn’t seem unreasonable that if he sobered up, he’d be a different and more responsible person. Seems kind of harsh to fully blame a guy for what he does while he’s nearly blackout drunk.
Five years is a long time. That’s as long as someone spends in high school. Sure, it isn’t a lifetime or anything, but it’d really set a young man back in life.
Well, according to this older article, he got drunk first and then started to fight with his wife. His wife left because of the fight, leaving him alone with the kids. So he was already drunk and then left alone with the kids. Maybe he thought he was in no condition to take care of the kids so he tried to take them to his sister’s home. He was drunk, realized it, tried to do the right thing, but couldn’t because he was drunk. A drunk guy poorly handled a situation dumped upon him.
If that’s the case, which that article seems to say it is, then I have a hard time putting this guy in jail for years. Give him a suspended sentence with a condition that he needs to seek treatment for his alcohol abuse and remain under the legal limit for 3 years. Buddy already lost his kids, sending him to jail isn’t going to do anything.
I wonder if I’d get a “Sentencing circle” if I left my child to die in the cold.
Of course, I’d never be such a waste of space that such a thing could happen, and if it did I’d long have since done the honorable thing and killed myself, but hypothetically… oh, right, I’m not the right race.
Seriously. The guy should spend the rest of his life in prison.
What if he’d been drinking and drove with the kids in the car, crashed and killed them? What if he’d been drinking and drove and crashed into somebody else’s car and killed a couple of kids who weren’t his? Would he get more than 5 stinking years in prison in either of those cases?
The kids suffered before they died. Why shouldn’t he have to suffer too?
If the facts are as stated, that he was drunk and she left the kids with him, she was certainly negligent, and that negligence contributed to their deaths. She essentially left them unsupervised by any competent caregiver. I think there’s reason to prosecute the mother as well.
Maybe the smaller sentence, if it could be proven that he was drunk when she left the kids with him. Their deaths are still his primary responsibility.
Geez, maybe alcohol is such a big problem up there because of all the fucking racists.
If a mother leaves her children with a man who is blind drunk, and he negligently causes their death because he’s too drunk to care for them, how is that not mostly the mother’s fault?
This is another guy? I read a news story about a guy whose pick up truck broke down, so he told his kids to walk the ten miles to their mom’s house alone in the snow. Then he repaired the truck, didn’t go looking for them, didn’t call their mom’s house–just went back home. His daughter ended up dying, and his son almost did–was getting delirious due to cold/took off all his clothes. Thought it was going to be about him.
Freudian Slit, yes, it’s a different story. That one involved two kids 8-12 years of age. And the story you’re referencing didn’t have the factor of an external cause for poor judgment.
While there are similarities between the two cases, the one you referenced seems even more gobsmacking idiotic.
Yeah, for sure. For some reason, I just read the title of the thread and assumed it was the same. Then I read more carefully and realized it was totally different. Still, always sad to read about kids freezing to death.
That’s typical for a young adult male aboriginal from a northern Canadian reserve. Constant drunken violence is common on many of Canada’s northern reserves.
I don’t have any general stats handy, but even if we just look at spousal killings in aboriginal communities, the rates are astounding when compared to the general population of all Canadians. Although aboriginals form only approximately 4% of Canada’s population, aboriginal spousal killings of females by males constitutes 14% of all spousal killings in Canada committed against women by men, and whopping 22% of all spousal killings in Canada committed against men by women. http://dsp-psd.pwgsc.gc.ca/Collectio...5-224-XIE.html
The prime factors leading to aboriginal communities being violent places include economic and social deprivation, alcohol and substance abuse, and an inter-generational cycle of violence. Again, I don’t have any stats handy, but the conviction rate for aboriginals is off the edge of the graph when compared to the general Canadian population.
I wouldn’t press the racist button too quickly, for quite literally, there are different sentencing considerations and procedures depending on whether an offender is aboriginal or not.
The theory is that sentencing by one’s community, including one’s elders, will have a greater effect on an aboriginal offender than sentencing by a white southern judge.
Locking up aboriginal offenders from northern reserves has not been very successful, for as soon as they get released, they go on violent drunken binges and get thrown in the hoosegow again. It becomes no more than revolving door justice. To address this, the Criminal Code has been amended such that “718.2 A court that imposes a sentence shall also take into consideration the following principles: . . . (e) all available sanctions other than imprisonment that are reasonable in the circumstances should be considered for all offenders, with particular attention to the circumstances of aboriginal offenders.”
Faced with such huge social problems, policing on many reserves is limited to only policing the most severe drunken violence. Obviously that is no solution either.
Sentencing circles try to find a solution that lies between the two extremes of revolving door justice and under policing. When a person is sentenced by the people with whom he interacts on a daily basis, he is more likely to accept the sentence, rather than simply blame the whites. When the sentence includes supervision by the community, there tends to be more success (less recidivism) than when aboriginal offenders are jailed off reserve. Sentencing circles started with minor matters, but due to their success, are now taking on more serious matters, in hope that there will be similar success. Note that sentencing circles are still under the aegis of the Court. If the judge is not satisfied with the outcome, then the judge trumps.
What is hard to accept for many non-aboriginals is that this means that there is one law for the white man, and a different law for the aboriginal. An aboriginal is given “particular attention” when trying to make a non-custodial sentence. A non-aboriginal is not. An aboriginal can ask for a sentencing circle. A non-aboriginal can not. Although the different treatment based on race is an attempt to mitigate the tremendous problems that many aboriginals live with, to many people non-aboriginals there is something tremendously wrong when there is not one law for all. I would not call that position racist – in fact desiring one law for all it is quite the opposite of being racist.
As far as the proposition that the alcohol problem is a result of racism goes, it does not wash. On northern reserves, whites are few and far between – often just a nurse, a teacher or two, and a police officer (if the reserve does not have its own aboriginal police officer). It would be ludicrous to suggest that such a small number of people could drive an entire community to severe alcoholism by virtue of their racism, if indeed they were racists, which is unlikely given the locations they chose to work in.
Governmental paternalism based on race, however, has had hugely detrimental effects on aboriginal communities. The single greatest example of this is the residential school issue. For several generations, aboriginals from northern reserves were taken from their parents and placed in boarding schools, where they were then raised to live as if they were white men. The result was that the parents, stripped of their children, often fell heavily on the bottle. The children, upon finishing school and returning to their reserves, often had little memory of their families, no understanding of their own culture, and most disturbingly, absolutely no comprehension of normal family life. They too, often fell on the bottle. That paternalism based on race, however well intentioned it may have been, resulted in severely dysfunctional communities.
Now here’s the question: is having one law for aboriginals and a different law for non-aboriginals yet another example of governmental paternalism based on race, or is it an effective mechanism for dealing with extraordinary circumstances by promoting community self-determination?
On a much more cynical note, just go through an alcohol treatment program and take an anger management course while waiting for trial, plead race and alcoholism, ask for a sentencing circle and show regret for your actions, and Bob’s your uncle. Some folks are sincere when they take this route, and some even clean up their act. Others simply know la règle du jeu, and play their hands well. Note, however, that aside from the race card, it is played this way by non-aboriginals as well.
