COPS ROUND THEM UP; COURTS LET THEM GO

"Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any
eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the
suspicion of being no policy at all."

- - Edmund Burke

Dear people responsible for the Canadian criminal justice
system,

I am writing you today to express my dismay with our nation's and our
territory's revolving-door justice system that keeps criminals on the
streets and innocent people in fear.

As a member of the media and a citizen of Whitehorse, I have a number
of concerns over the way justice issues are dealt with in our courts.

Our courts, which administer the law of the land, often appear to
render the efforts of our RCMP meaningless as officers. Police work at
a risk to their own personal safety and often find themselves
reinvestigating criminals who go in and out through the revolving door
you hold the key to.

The same drug dealers who were selling drugs to our kids three years
ago, are quite likely the very same drug dealers who are selling drugs
to our kids today (take a walk down Wheeler Street), leading to
addiction, and even more crime to feed that addiction.

Drug dealers are back on the streets in only a few months or years,
politicians and business people who steal millions from taxpayers get
university speaking tours (see the outcome of the Gomery inquiry) and
murderers trade in their prison blues for street clothes in short
order after sentencing.

A brief view of the last year of sentencing in our own territorial
justice system is quite telling.

In the last year, we have had a number of people convicted of crimes
against the community for which they received, depending on your view,
little or no punishment.

After smashing her baby's head against a wall and discarding the
infant's lifeless carcass in a dumpster in Dawson City, mother Justina
Ellis received a six-year prison sentence.

Christina Asp drew three years for taking a 13-inch butcher knife and
plunging it into her boyfriend's chest.

Daniel Silver got two years after being caught with 41 grams of
cocaine/crack and a loaded firearm.

Jason Richard Martin was given four months, in addition to a sentence
he's already serving, for beating his elderly mother.

Joanne Walker got 15 months for ripping off her fellow community
members to the tune of $120,000 in an insurance scam.

Justice?

Perhaps as a society, we should be thinking of a new way to reform our
lawbreakers while assisting the RCMP in their efforts and leaving
citizens with the peace of mind to walk the streets of their own community.

Perhaps we should find or implement ways to take criminals, who break
laws in plain view, off the streets (see the territorial government's
new safer communities legislation).

Perhaps we should start weighing individuals' and society's rights on
a different scale.

Because if our police have to keep arresting the same criminals the
courts keep letting go, witnesses won't come forward. They have no
confidence in the justice system so criminals are left living downtown
instead of behind bars. So who is our justice system really serving?

Maybe we should start thinking about reviewing our Criminal Code
and/or the sentences of our judges.

After all, if the justice system is supposed to protect the public's
right to safety, how come it seems more concerned with protecting the
individual rights of criminals?