I think people understand that while the law, by necessity, is black and white, society and culture are more fluid. And I think Canadians are capable of understanding that the judge did as he was bound by the law. But they can still feel angry for the victims and demand a public dialogue about making changes to a legal system that doesn’t seem to be serving the victimized as well as it might.
No one is calling for the law to be ignored, or anyone to be lynched. But being angry over a decision is healthy if it leads to positive change within our system for handling the victims of sexual assault.
Yes a lot f froth rhetoric was spewed upon the decision, but that hasn’t translated to anything bordering on dangerous to my mind. Let people blow off some steam, sell some newspapers, express outrage. Cooler heads will prevail. One day later and the whole country seems to be more circumspect, recognizing balancing justice, fairness and victim interests will not be easy. And any changes must be carefully thought out and considered before they are proposed.
But that conversation needs to start somewhere, and I’m cool with this being that starting place.
There is an issue right there with the terminology. I would say we have no idea whether there were any “victims” in this particular case or not. The use of that term more or less assumes he’s actually guilty and G. “got off” on the technicalities of the law - in short, that the decision, while correct under the law as it stands, was unjust.
Is this what you believe? Was justice ill-served in this particular case?
The key word here is “if”.
I happen to think that public anger, stoked by media reports that had condemned G. in public in advance of the trial, and fed by ignorance of what actually transpired at the trial, is unlikely to lead to the sort of measured improvements that are actually required.
In short, I would of course agree that public anger is healthy if it leads to positive change, but I am doubting that it will.
It hasn’t lead to systemic problems yet. Of course, those are likely to take a long time to show up.
You are not going to get to reasoned and intelligent responses to this if people aren’t pissed off first.
There really is little “widespread denunciation” of the judge’s decision in and of itself. You yourself have been unable to provide any sort of legitimate or influential example of anyone saying “the judge made the wrong decision.” A few people on Facebook or holding signs whose emotions exceed their understanding of the facts of the case do not constitute “widespread denunciation.”
Such “Denunciation” as there has been of the verdict - and there has been very little indeed - has been outnumbered fifty to one by denunciation of other aspects of the case; the ineptitude of the prosecution, certainly, rankles many, but even more so the social reality that women feel ashamed to bring these sorts of charges forward.
If one looks at the facts of the case, the weakness of the Crown’s efforts can all be traced back to one central thing; the events happened more than a decade ago. You can pretty much explain the trial with just that fact. A state where women feel afraid to come forward about something like this until years later and only when they know for sure they are not alone in having a criminal complaint against the same person is not a healthy state of affairs at all. That is what most people seem to be upset about. That is what has to change.
I’ll be worried about unintended consequences when I hear people saying the principle of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt should be changed. I’ve heard not a single person say that.
I disagree. There has been plenty, some of which I’ve linked to, some of which I haven’t. You just hand-waved them away.
This is a complete misunderstanding of what went wrong with the prosecution’s case at trail. This was not a case of fallible memories exposed as fallible by the passage of time - not at all. The judge expressly noted that all allowances would have been made for that.
Rather, the judge found deliberate withholding of key relevant evidence, and deliberate collusion between the complainants to bolster a case to ‘destroy’ their adversary; and literally last-minute “revelations” of key bits of evidence following one witness being demolished on the stand. In short, they deliberately misled the police, the prosecutors and the Court, and were caught doing so.
The complaint that the witnesses had merely ‘forgotten’ key evidence, or had failed to disclose it because they didn’t think it was ‘relevant’, the judge quite rightly dismissed as obvious nonsense.
Quotes and extracts from the judgment to prove all that available if necessary.
There is a limit to how much the prosecution could prepare for witnesses that deliberately deceive them. I’ve argued elsewhere that there were, indeed, some facts the prosecution could have caught with diligent preparation, but the converse argument has weight too - in the face of deceptive witnesses who ignore instructions not to collude, there is little the prosecution could do.
That fact that you, whom I regard as quite intelligent and well-read, could come up with such a complete misunderstanding of what went wrong, is yet another example of the problem: despite the widespread coverage of the trial in the press, this trial - like other trials - is often not understood by the public, leading to pressure for change that is misapplied.
In summary, it is hard to understand why a system that refused to convict in the face of complainants who were found to be deliberately deceptive “has to change”. There are indeed problems with the system - you have identified some and I agree that they exist and should be rectified - but this case isn’t a good example of them.
First, what Malthus says, italicized, bolded, underlined, grapeicized, and shouted from the roof tops.
Look, in this case the legal system worked. I challenge anyone disagreeing with this to put forward constructive changes to the legal system that would have led to one or more convictions without sacrificing the criminal burden of proof.
What has failed is society in which a lot of men believe that it is OK to mistreat women, and a lot of women do not feel comfortable enough to reject such treatment. Let’s continue to work on reducing the rate of abuse.
Whoops, pressed send by mistake and missed most of the last paragraph.
First, what Malthus says, italicized, bolded, underlined, grapeicized, and shouted from the roof tops.
Look, in this case the legal system worked. I challenge anyone disagreeing with this to put forward constructive changes to the legal system that would have led to one or more convictions without sacrificing the criminal burden of proof.
What has failed is society in which a lot of men still believe that it is OK to mistreat women, and a lot of women still do not feel comfortable enough to reject such treatment. Let’s continue to work on reducing the rate of abuse. Let’s work on how we raise our children. How we interact with our family, friends and co-workers. Let’s speak out and directly confront abusive behaviour and abusive attitudes when we come across them; let’s build supports for people suffering abuse, including counselling, housing, emergency financial support and employment assistance; let’s reach out to people who are at risk or who have suffered abuse.
We are, in fact, figments of your imagination. None of us exist other then in your head. In reality, you are in a nut house on planet Gloorg raving like a lunatic. They have your tentacles strapped to a gurney and are in the process of giving you their equivalent of a lobotomy, which is why you are having these ‘technical’ difficulties as your delusions slowly subside back to Gloorgian normalcy where things like the internet don’t exist. Unfortunately, Gloorgians have a distributed brain and these lobotomies take many tries before succeeding. So, the ‘internet’ will probably be back shortly as your neural pathways reroute themselves. You can thank SaskTel if you want, but they don’t exist, either.
Download this the next time your internet is out, play it back for him for a few seconds while you tell him it is the live TV news and it is time for the Piper Clan to retreat to the basement. Bonus points if you arrange for Mrs. Piper to shout “Hurry up and get down here!” from the basement.
That wasn’t actually an internet outage. SaskTel’s DNS server just crashed, is all. Granted, if you don’t know what that is, how to recognize it, or how to work around it, the difference is pretty much academic. A DNS (domain name server) is like a giant directory of the internet, which matches domain names like straightdope.com to the IP address of that domain (209.104.5.198). That bit of information is what allows your browser or whatever to send and receive information from remote webservers.
It is possible to manually set your computer to use a DNS server other than SaskTel’s. Google maintains a DNS server at 8.8.8.8 that anyone can point their network connection at, for example.
I didn’t notice a thing, myself, what with using Shaw for my home ISP and ignoring my phone all evening.
I feel the same. I’m flying on Tuesday, and got an e-mail message from Air Canada telling me that if I want in-flight entertainment on this particular flight, I need to download their entertainment app to my phone.
My question: how? How do I download apps to my phone? They never showed me that when I bought the damn thing. Northern Piper, you and I are apparently both techno-peasants–so I’d say that you are in good company.
For my flight, I plan to take my reading glasses, a good book, and some magazines.
Good plan to not download AC’s app. One of the questions airport security will ask you is “Have you downloaded anything onto your cell phone in the last 24 hours?” If you answer “yes”, they will confiscate the phone and rendite you onto a very different flight.
And they wonder why people don’t like air travel any more.
On March 28th, 2016 we lost my long term boyfriend’s father to cancer. He lived in Kapuskasing, ON. Bereavement fare on Air Canada to Timmins was still over $1800 for one person, and there would still be a need for ground transportation from Timmins, plus awkward 14 hour waits between buses and airplanes. West Jet gave us a much more reasonable 570-650 per person flight to Thunder Bay. It was cheaper for both of us to fly to Thunder Bay, stay overnight in hotels, rent a car and drive the 600+ km to Kap, than for him to fly.
We had ridiculously tight connections in Toronto, and on the way there my partner’s luggage didn’t make the flight. We got a credit for sundries, and on the way back they waived his checked baggage fees, so that was nice. We brought some family stuff back without charge.
It was an ok trip considering the circumstances. There were light annoying snow squalls all day Thursday March 31 driving from TBay to Kap, and the weather was good Monday afternoon April 1 when we drove from Kapuskasing to Longlac. Tuesday was good driving weather in the morning, but by by the time I dropped my boyfriend off at the airport it was clouded over. I stayed an extra day in Thunder Bay to see friends and family. It snowed overnight. 7 cm downtwon Port Arthur.
It occured to me that only in Canada would someone say "“Im only 600 km away, I might as well stop by and visit.”
Still, Air Canada has pissed me off for the last time. I will do everything in my power to never fly with them again.
