Seems the court system in Canada is hit and miss on actual justice, and these days it often appears to be a total miss. A few cases in the news of the past few months speak to the missing justice in violent crime cases in Canada.
The murder of Jordan Manners will go unpunished. At the outset it was case clear. Evidence was abundant, witnesses were forthcoming, and a lot of anguished people sought justice for the reputedly mild-mannered Jordan Manners. Then it all went south. What happened to annihilate justice in this case?
News reports (invested with a bit of the Jane and Finch twang), said, “SW, the only one to claims to have heard a gunshot, said she heard the sound coming from the general direction of the washroom and shortly after saw Manners leaving, followed closely by two black boys, one fat and one slim. (The report continues. . . ) CD and JW are both black. JW is tall and thin, while CD is shorter and stout. But the boys she saw were dressed differently than the two defendants that day and were shorter, defence lawyers said. Besides two young black men were seen hurrying away several blocks away from the school, they said.” It looks like fat boy and slim walk away scot-free, and that's a wrap on justice in the case of Jordan Manners.
Daniel Pratt is on the streets a mere five years after murdering Grant DePatie in a senseless act of using vehicular homicide as a mask for murder, a theft of $20 as the feint behind an act of mindless rage. It was an unthinkable torture of Grant DePatie that saw the young man dragged 9 km and rendered into pieces hanging from the undercarriage of the car. Terrible, and ironic, because the youthful DePatie worked at a gas station though he purposely never drove a car because a high-performance bicycle was his chosen mode of transportation. He was a jock. He posthumously changed the gas station laws in British Columbia to Pay Before You Pump.
Dwayne Allen Shoenborn dodged a triple-murder conviction three years ago for the senseless murder of his three children not in his custody, and now he occupies a psychicatric treatment centre where he edges toward the exit door. A gullible board recommended he be free to visit the streets of a city in the Lower Mainland of BC. The mother of the children cried foul, publicly fearing for her own safety, and the Attorney General of BC backed her up. If the government changes, Dwayne Allen Shoenborn will be up for giving himself another shot at freedom, and a seemingly compliant mental health board will likely be advocating on his behalf.
(My suggestion would be to lower the amount of SSRI antidepressant Shoenborn is administered in the mental hospital because the antidepressant have made him chatty and quite convincing to his 'guardians' on the mental health board. And I suggest keeping him away from the board, find other people for him to see in the hospital who don`t have the keys to everything.
The initial first degree murder conviction of Kim Walker for killing James Hayward in Saskatchewan has been overturned last year and the retrial produced a manslaughter conviction at the end of May 2011. Well, two convictions is better than nothing, even though evidence tells the story for premeditated first degree murder, as was the finding in the first trial. What went wrong in the first trial that abbreviated the meaning of justice here in the end after retrial? Well the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal said a fatal error was made when discussions were held between lawyers and judge without Walker present.
News reports from the second trial reiterated evidence that Kim Walker, father to Jadah Walker, had still killed the same James Hayward (then still Jadah's boyfriend) for getting his daughter hooked on drugs. Jadah, 16 years old and living with Hayward, was using drugs. Kim Walker entered the house in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, on March 17, 2003, armed with a pistol. Eyewitnesses including Jadah identified Walker as the shooter while ten rounds were expended, five into the victim. The justice in this case remains to be seen in the sentencing. I'm always holding my breath anyway at violent crime. Aren`t you?
