The Supreme Cour of Canada released its decision today in R v Bissonette, which dealt with multiple periods of parole ineligibility for mass murderers.
Bissonnette attackef a mosque some years ago, shooting and killing six people, and wounding others.
The normal penalty for 1st degree murder is life without parole eligibility for 25 years. The Crown at trial applied to have the periods of parole ineligibility « stacked »: 6 x 25 years = 150 years of parole ineligibility. The Crown relied on an amendment to the Criminal Code made by the Harper government, which authorized stacking.
Supreme Court unanimously struck down the provision of the Code under s. 12 of the Charter, finding that life imprisonment without a chance of parole is cruel and unusual.
Conservative Party is upset and calling on gov’t to reenact the provision, using s 33 if needed; Liberal gov’t is studying the judgment to consider options; NDP says a way must be found to punish hate-crimes. I haven’t seen any statements from the Bloq or the Greens.
Is there any real advantage to denying eligibility for parole, or is it just posturing to look tough to the public? If the crime is so heinous that the will exists today today to incarcerate them for life, can’t we trust the parole board to make the same judgment?
Technical eligibility might be more likely to elicit a guilty plea, and make the prisoner less troublesome.
I agree with it. I’d like to see us move more towards a Norwegian style justice system that focuses on rehabilitation. I think offering the possibility of parole is a good thing. Do a periodic review and if they are not rehabilitated then keep them locked up. But if somebody has truly rehabilitated then, I think they should be given another chance.
Maybe Canada is different. Here in the US, one of the big arguments against the death penalty is that murders can live a full life, and yet will never get a chance to kill another innocent person, because they will never get out of prison.
If even the substitute for the death penalty is considered “cruel and unusual,” then what is left to protect society?
I can’t help feeling that the Canadian Supreme Court places more value on the lives of murderers than on the victims and potential victims.
? Not getting this. The prisoner is still incarcerated and if denied parole will remain incarcerated, and nobody seems to be calling that “cruel and unusual” in any way.
I don’t see what would be at all disrespectful to or devaluing of the victims in simply decreeing that you can’t stay in the slammer for more than 25 years without at least getting taken off the shelf and dusted and considered for possible provisional release. That doesn’t imply, and I definitely think it shouldn’t imply, any guarantee of parole.
I’m not sure I think such a provision is absolutely necessary from a human-rights point of view, but I don’t see how it is in any way reneging on the justice system’s commitment to “protect society”.
This ruling is easy to misunderstand, as indeed you’ve managed to do.
Until 2011 the maximum penalty in Canada has always been life imprisonment with no possibility of parole for 25 years. It doesn’t mean – and has never meant – that a dangerous offender will be released after 25 years. This was changed in 2011 by the conservative Harper government to allow “stacking” of consecutive life sentences, thus extending parole ineligibility to arbitrarily long lengths of time. It’s this legislation that was the subject of the ruling. Its constitutionality had already been unanimously rejected by the Quebec Court of Appeal, and now it’s been unanimously rejected by the Supreme Court. Clearly, there has been no dissent in high courts about the fact that this is bullshit legislation.
Again, this doesn’t mean they’ll be paroled after 25 years. There have been a number of horrific killers sentenced in Canada under the pre-2011 law who were technically eligible for parole after 25 years but who in reality have no chance in hell of ever being paroled. The price of a society based on constitutional principles is that they’re entitled to apply for parole every few years and have to be given a fair hearing. It’s no different in the US, where despite often arbitrary long sentences, and occasional life sentences without possibility of parole (as in the Ahmaud Arbery killers) even monsters like Charles Manson were technically eligible for parole. Manson had quite a few parole hearings IIRC, and never got out.
Comparisons to the death penalty don’t carry much weight here, because we’ve not had the death penalty for 60 years. The last executions were in 1962 and it was formally abolished by Parliament in 1976.
The penalty of life imprisonment isn’t a « substitute » for the death penalty. It is the penalty for certain serious crimes.
Yeah, one can quibble about whether this decision is correct, or if 25 years is the right number, but there’s certainly nothing absurd about it. It’s still possible to lock a criminal up for life, if needed. Really, the only purpose served by “without possibility of parole” is political grandstanding by the DA or judges or equivalent position, so they can show off how “tough on crime” they are.
It would be the federal government that claims the credit. Crown prosecutors and judges aren’t elected and don’t need to do « tough on crime » to keep their positions.
And it’s also worth considering that, though not necessarily a high probably sort of thing, it could be possible in some cases to rehabilitate a mass murderer. I agree that the Crown’s request was probably to satisfy someone’s “tough on crime” agenda or reputation.
I don’t like the decision. The chances that such a sub-human monster can ever be rehabilitated are negligible. What will happen, though, is that he will live in hope of being paroled only to see his hopes dashed over and over every five years.
Which particular sub-human monster are you talking about? Some of those receiving life sentences might be capable of rehabilitation, especially those sentenced at a relatively young age. Many others, probably not. But surely a parole board, viewing the individual’s record after 25 years, is at least as capable if not much more capable of making such a distinction than a judge at the time of sentencing a quarter-century before?
Remember, too, that the Supreme Court decision doesn’t invalidate the “dangerous offender” designation, another provision of the Criminal Code intended to protect the public.
So what? If they’re such monsters that they’re deemed not to deserve parole, then fuck 'em. But those who do deserve it get a shot at it.
In general I lean as you do. But I’ll make the following point in general. Not poking at you personally; you just explained one POV with admirable clarity and I’m going to take a differing POV expressed (I hope) with equal clarity. …
Ref this recent post by an expert and the one it quotes for a pithy bit of background on the purpose of prison:
To the (debatable) degree that punishment is a legitimate goal of prison, the argument can be made that the original trial is the place and time best suited to establishing how much punishment is appropriate. The evidence is fresh, the memories of the victims are fresh, the case is decided according to the tenor and standards of the time, in a fully public venue, etc. Warts and all, it’s the best opportunity for our system to get the right answer, not just an answer.
As well, the segregative aspect plays here and now too. The primary trial is making a determination on how much segregation is the minimum acceptable to ensure public safety from this particular defendant.
In any prisoner’s subsequent life, whenever parole hearings occur they amount to making a latter-day judgment call on both the current state of the inmate’s rehabilitation, and in effect revisiting the segregation and punishment decisions rendered at the original trial.
Specifically for murder cases, at this later date when the victims are long deceased and the prisoner is still here living on the public nickel and none too happily so in most cases, it can be easy to discount the thinking that led to the original decisions on segregation and punishment. The only people being harmed now at this much later date are the prisoner and the taxpayer. Both of whose burden can be relieved by paroling the prisoner. The “happy” news, at least in US prisons is that we don’t even try to rehabilitate, so parole is likely to be denied on that basis alone.
As you say, 25 years is rather arbitrary. But if indeed 25 years is the agreed minimum punishment for one murder, what is the appropriate punishment for 2? Or 4? Are they cheaper by the dozen? Should they be?
Difficult questions to be sure. Not ones I have answers to. But I would not go so far as to say the “stacking” laws, or “life without possibility of parole” must have been motivated only by political grandstanding. Other more legitimate considerations should, and certainly could have, gotten a look-in at the time the legislation was passed.
I’ve not read the Court’s decision to try to understand what rationale they gave in overturning this, nor am I even remotely competent to opine on it even if I had.
But I do see the underlying rationale in some nasty cases where “We the Judge/Jury who have been up to our eyeballs in this for the last 6 months have decided on punishment that includes no possibility of parole and we insist that nobody later second guess our decision with comparatively little investment in deeply knowing or understanding the case when they do so.”
Appeals exist to correct errors at trial. The parole board is there to relieve the pressure on the public purse and to release folks who have been punished enough and segregated / rehabilitated past the point of further undue risk to the public.
A nasty business no matter how it’s sliced. Glad it’s not my job.
I disagree. A non-partisan Crown’s duty is to consider what the law provides for and consider whether it applies to a particular case.
Here, Parliament had provided that in the case of conviction of mass murder, the life sentences should be stacked. On what basis would a Crown refuse to follow the Criminal Code on sentencing, once the accused had been convicted of a mass murder?
On the subject of punishment vs rehabilitation, and the related concept of “leniency” for a serious offense, I’m reminded of the story of a young American physics student at Cambridge who, under conditions of considerable mental stress, tried to poison his tutor. He put noxious chemicals in an apple which, fortunately, the tutor didn’t eat. But the university discovered the plot, and had to consider the appropriate consequences. No doubt the consensus of opinion, especially today, would be to immediately expel him from the university and turn him over to the police, where he would likely end up with a prison sentence and a criminal record that would follow him for the rest of his life.
The university instead chose to consider the student’s potential, that it was a first offense prompted by stressful life circumstances, and instead put him on parole and psychiatric counseling. He graduated and eventually became one of the world’s great theoretical physicists. His name was Robert Oppenheimer, and he was later the technical leader on the Manhattan Project and then, among other things, the director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.
I guess my point is that sometimes a little justifiable mercy and rehabilitation benefits not just the accused but society as a whole. And I’m not sure that the best sentencing decisions are necessarily always made in the heat of the moment, but that sometimes the perspective of the individual’s subsequent behaviour are useful input into things like parole decisions.
In any case I would reiterate that this Supreme Court ruling merely invalidates some rather draconian legislation from 2012, and restores the status quo that has been the sentencing law in Canada ever since the abolition of the death penalty.
Yes, that’s an important point. What this ruling does is restore the sentencing provisions that have been in place since 1976. That’s 46 years of this system working. There weren’t major claims during that period that it favours convicted murderers.