Canada has some weird laws. A shopkeeper can refuse to sell you any item over 50 cents if you are only willing to pay in pennies. In many places, it is illegal to water your lawn while it's raining. In Calgary, it's illegal to sell non-prescription contact lenses at costume shops. There's one law in particular that bugs me, but it comes from a good place.
See there's this thing thing we have in our Constitution that guarantees people the right to a speedy trial. The Americans have it, too. Pretty much all industrialized nations have the same clauses in the contracts between their governments and the citizenry, except for the ones that are known for being horrible for human rights (I'm looking at you, China).
Part of that is that while people are on trial, they get somewhere between 1.5 and 2 times the amount of time they've served subtracted from their sentence. So if you're sentenced to 3 years, and your trial took 6 months, you would serve 3 years - (6 months * 2)—only 2 years. Makes sense if the courts are all backed up and your parking violations are making you scared of dropping the soap, but what about more serious violations?
In 2009, a guy in Kelowna, BC, killed his 77-year-old mother. The charge was manslaughter. He had 4 times the legal limit of alcohol for driving in his bloodstream, and the article doesn't say how she died. They're from a prominent business family in BC—they run a winery.
On Monday, he was sentenced to 6.5 years. He has been in jail for 2.5 years during the trial. He now has to serve 18 months to finish it off, since those 2.5 years were given at double the rate of normal incarceration years.
My question is: This guy KILLED someone. It was, by definition, a violent crime. I can understand maybe giving someone who was smoking pot or vandalized a porta-potty some time off their sentence because it's mostly the fact that they were convicted that matters. But if someone has the potential to murder someone else when they drink, why are they getting extra time off their sentence for while they were on trial?
Here's why I care: There are two reasons to incarcerate someone. The first is the same reason why parents give their kids time-outs: Someone did sumptin' bad, they need to be punished, so we put them away. This makes sense for non-violent crimes. It shows the person who did bad that there are negative consequences to their actions and (hopefully) they learn from it. The other reason is to remove them from society. See, the first is a time-based rap on the knuckles—"Bad criminal! Go stand in the corner!". The second is more like, "You are bad for us. You can't be with us. Get away until you learn better. You don't deserve to be with the rest of us."
I don't know, maybe I'm being unfair. I understand compensating someone for their loss of freedom if they're found innocent, but that means that our public prosecutors need to be more certain of their cases before taking them. That seems like something a free society should have: freedom from the fear of insane prosecution. But if they're found guilty, don't you think a little thought should go in to how the sentencing is handled? If someone murdered someone, why do they get time off just because the crime they committed was complex? Isn't that just encouraging people to make their murders hard to solve, so they serve less time for the same result?
Then again, couldn't we all just try harder not to be such fuckers and just get along?
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