CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

IN BRIEF: While it is natural to feel sympathy for a father who killed
a man feeding his daughter drugs, that doesn't excuse his crime.

There are likely few people who don't feel some sympathy for Kim
Walker, the Yorkton father who shot and killed the drug-dealing
boyfriend of his daughter in a desperate attempt to save her from a
life of addiction.

Here was a man at his wits end: In March, 2003 his then- 16-year-old
daughter Jadah was addicted to morphine and living with 24-year-old
convicted drug dealer James Hayward, who had spent time in jail for
trafficking.

Though Walker and his wife Elizabeth succeeded in having Jadah
arrested by the RCMP and committed for assessment under the Mental
Health Act, soon after she was released she was taken by friends back
to Hayward's house.

Walker said he'd received telephone death threats from Hayward -- and
one call threatening Jadah saying "he would make her disappear . . . I
believed he was going to kill her".

Faced with these circumstances, any parent would want to do everything
they could to protect their child.

But Walker did not do the right thing -- call the RCMP. Instead, he
took a pistol to Hayward's house, tried to get Jadah to leave, then
shot her boyfriend five times, leaving him to bleed to death on the
floor.

On Friday, a jury convicted 50-year-old Walker of second-degree
murder. An appeal by Walker is pending, but if the conviction remains
unchanged, he'll serve a minimum of 10 years before becoming eligible
for parole.

Some compare the case with that of another previously law-abiding
father who took the law into his own hands -- Robert Latimer.

In 1993, Latimer, a Wilkie-area farmer, killed his severely disabled
12-year-old daughter Tracy because he couldn't bear to see her
suffering. A seven-year legal battle culminated with the Supreme Court
rejecting a judge's attempt to sentence Latimer to only one year in
jail for second-degree murder. Latimer finally went to jail in 2001
and becomes eligible for day parole in December.

Some argue people like Latimer and Walker deserve special
consideration because they acted out of genuine compassion when they
killed. They are wrong.

Walker and Latimer deserve our sympathy, but they are not the victims
here. Minimizing their crimes -- and they were crimes -- would make it
easier for others to make the wrong decision.