JUSTICE IS BLIND

Some wits may have added to the above title "DEAF AND DUMB". Perhaps the truth lies somewhere inbetween. Justice is a mass production factory system. Look at the numbers of crimes, arrests, charges and convictions. There are thousands of cases per year for every single courthouse in Canada. Mass production factory systems make errors. When they are big enough they get recalled and or fixed.

I've been perusing some old newspaper files I've collected over the years. In the Kitchener-Waterloo Record on April 24, 2007 they carried an Associated Press story titled "Exonerated man is 200th U.S. case". This particular gentleman spent twenty-five years in jail for rape. Most of us would have difficulty either feeling sympathy for him or calling him a gentleman. The problem is that he was the 200th case "...in the United States in which a convicted person was exonerated based on DNA evidence." This was a result of the Innocence Project whose spokesperson is the well known "hurricane" Rubin Carter. Here in Canada we have the Association for the Defence of the Wrongly Convicted led by Mr. James Lockyer. This 200th case occurred nearly five years ago. How many more exonerations have there been since and just as importantly how many more wrongful convictions have there been since then?

What do the following names have in common: Marshall (no relative), Morin, Milgaard, Baltovich, Mullins, Driskell, Truscott, Dalton, Dumont ? These are the names I came up with from fifteen minutes of digging into old files. The name Sophonow comes to my mind and my own memory is telling me I've read of many more. These are the names of people wrongly convicted for murder here in Canada. If our system can prove these people "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" ,in the most serious criminal cases, then how pathetic are the standards for lesser criminal cases such as assaults, robberies, break-ins and thefts? How many mothers, fathers and baby sitters have been convicted of negligence or manslaughter in Canada or Ontario because of "junk science"? I'm referring to SBS or Shaken Baby Syndrome which I posted here in the Advocate last week . How many other unaccountable pathologists are there out there besides finally disgraced Dr. Charles Smith? How many other "professionals" knew that Dr. Smith was a quack and didn't blow the whistle for fear of hurting their careers?

Here in Waterloo Region we are currently in the process of building a new larger, fancier Courthouse in downtown Kitchener. Does anyone really believe that our Justice system will be the better for it? I don't. Our current Justice System is too comfortable, too well off, too arrogant and far too unaccountable. Our Judges are part of a political patronage system which rewards politically active lawyers with Judicial appointments. Our lawyers have far too many financial incentives to keep civil cases before the courts far longer than necessary. Our Crowns and Prosecuters while less inclined than their U.S. cousins to run up high conviction percentages to get themselves reelected; nevertheless have pressures and incentives to get convictions and occasionally fail to share appropriate information and evidence with the Defence. The system is broken and it's not the broken that bricks and mortar can fix.