He was a square-jawed Canadian Air Force officer with a brilliant future, a man entrusted with flying prime ministers and Queen Elizabeth II. On Monday, he was exposed as a serial killer with a shocking fetish for girls’ panties that he documented in a trove of twisted photos of himself.
At a hearing that reduced victims’ relatives to tears, the lurid photos were shown one by one in court as Col. Russell Williams, 47, pleaded guilty to murdering two women, sexually assaulting two others and committing dozens of break-ins in which he stole underwear from the bedrooms of girls as young as 11.
He faces an automatic sentence of life in prison with no possibility for parole for at least 25 years.
Canada has not used the noose since 1961. This would have been a good situation.
The article doesn’t specify whether or not he was tried by a military court; I assume that he wasn’t, and therefore since Canada doesn’t have the death penalty, neither civil or military court could sentence him to death in any case.
Correct. And all’s the pity. There are a few other such cases over the decades.
Canada, however, has had over the years a number of notorious cases in which one sentenced to life was finally absolved after decades. It is a good thing that men did not die for things they did not do.
Now, fix your justice system.
But what can you say about a society that refuses to put to death this man, who has committed such heinous crimes – yet this same society condones the murder of innocent fetuses.
sophy0075 (#4), I think you forgot to add that, if Canada only had the common sense to allow everyone to carry a concealed weapon, the crimes most likely never would have happened in the first place.
Not a big fan of capital punishment here. But if your going to do it, this would seem to be the sort of case for it. All of which said I do not like at all the American system. There are no uniform standards for legal representation and in some states (coincidentally those who are most apt to execute people) there are virtually none. We are still routinely finding innocent people in prison and even on death row. If I were to support the death penalty the legal standard would have to be changed from “guilty beyond reasonable doubt” to “guilty beyond any doubt.” And the manner in which executions are carried out is semi-barbaric.
Americans have an obsession with technology and seem sold on the idea that newer and more technological = better. No method of execution in the United States introduced in the last 100 years is an improvement over hanging when done correctly.
The only reason hanging got the bad reputation that it did in America is because, with very few exceptions most states had no professional executioners. The hangman was whoever was available and willing (often the local sheriff) who generally had little or no training. Horrifically botched executions were inevitable.
The British (and Canadians) on the other hand had hanging down to a science. Their hangmen were specially trained and apprenticed civil servants. In Britain the standard was 30 seconds or less from the moment the condemned man set foot on the gallows til the trap was opened. There were no pious sermons, speeches or last words. Albert Pierrepoint, probably Britain’s most famous executioner, generally took less than fifteen seconds with seven as his record to hang a man. In 400+ hangings he never botched one.
Compare that with the recent “execution” in Ohio that was finally stopped after 45 minutes(!) of poking and stabbing the man in a futile search for a vein.
If Canadian prisons are like US prisons, his life will be a living hell until a fellow inmate ends it. May he repent and be forgiven before that happens.
I have only one comment: Bobby Marshall. He was an Indian in Nova Scotia, sentenced to life … for a murder he did not commit. The miscarriage of justice was discovered after (IIRC) about 17 years. He would have been hung, for a murder he didn’t commit.
I remember to powerful comment of an Egyptian headsman some 30 years ago. He said (paraphrase) “It always gives me great pleasure in my work when the man says ‘Allah, forgive me.’ What’s incredibly difficult is when he says ‘Allah, forgive [i]them[/i].”
#5—with all due respect, you have set up an impossible standard for obtaining a conviction, let alone a death sentence. Having tried jury cases for almost 25 years (albeit in the civil rather than criminal arena), I believe, as a matter of moral certainly, that any competent trial lawyer can find some degree of doubt in any set of facts, esp. if, as is constitutionally required, you only have to install that doubt in one of thirteen minds (any of the twelve jurors can block a death recommendation by the jury, and the judge can refuse to follow the jury’s recommendation if he or she, independently, believes that the evidence presents sufficient doubt that the death penalty is merited. In any given case, any decent trial lawyer can beat your “guilty beyond any doubt” standard standing on his or her head. I’d fight ten men for the privilege of having the jury instructed on that standard for any client of mine.
For the record, I am opposed to the death penalty, because 1. I believe that it engenders a callous social attitude toward life that bleeds over into other life-oriented contexts (see the Pastoral Letter of the US Roman Catholic Bishops that came out in about 1984 on “the seamless web” of life. I read it as an undergraduate, and in terms of influencing my views on the world, it ranks right up there with “The Road to Serfdom” and “God and Man at Yale.”), and 2, the unsettling number of instances in which convicted perpetrators were later exonerated…sometimes before it was too late, sometimes not. Michigan became one of the first states to outlaw the death penalty, in around 1853, because of such a case. In an episode a little closer to home, two men who were convicted of, and condemned on the basis of, the brutal murder and rape (in that order) of a dear college friend of mine were later released when DNA evidence, unavailable at the time of conviction, proved that it was a virtual statistical impossibility that they had been the perpetrators of the crime (their conviction was based in part, on a confession of a third participant exacted by the Chicago Police Department. It is now commonly understood that a confession obtained by the CPD has absolutely no probative value as to the guilt or innocence of the person making the confession…but that is for a different thread…)
Re # 8
KevinBabb,
I am very much [url=http://ad-orientem.blogspot.com/2007/10/this-year-supreme-court-will-address.html]on the record[/url] as opposed to the DP for some of the same reasons you cited.
I am glad that the consensus is against the death penalty. Yet you now assume the awesome position of valuing a life illegally taken. Is is it to be imprisonment and if so for how long? Do you take into account the value of the life taken? Where is justice to be found for the victim? You have a lot of value judgments to make and by what standard or authority do you make and measure them (if one is even needed or, if you have any transcendent standard at all)? The UN? The EU? The humanist manifesto? Individual judgment as to what feels right for you?
Just remember that God himself values life so highly that His standard required restitution and atonement of the highest order-the life of the murderer. And God authorized that to be administered by human civil and legal authorities however imperfect they might be. As sinners we recognize that God’s justice requires our death and Jesus bore that death in our place. I am troubled at simply setting aside a biblical standard because it offends our modern sensibilities and it seems to me that I have heard this sort of argument elsewhere.
Do you folks have any clue about how guilty 99.99999999999999% of people in prison are? No human system is perfect, but in the USA high profile criminal law has become less a derermination of guilt or innocnece and more of a jousting match over perceived “constitutional” rights. I am reminded of the line from “The Big Chill” when Mary Kay Place is asked why she gave up her crusade for criminal constitutional rights and became a real estate lawyer in Atlanta: “It was my clients. They were soooo guilty.”
#11… your statistic may be off a bit. It suggests that that the number of imprisoned innocents is about 1 out of 10 quadrillion.
The entire world population (most of which is not in prison) is less than a millionth of that.
I would be very surprised if even 99% of the people now in prison are guilty of the crimes they were convicted of…. much less 99.99999999999999%.
Re #s 11 & 12
Varying sources suggest the percentage of wrongful convictions is somewhere between roughly 1% – 3% of prison inmates. DA’s when surveyed generally put the figure at less than 1% (not surprisingly) while public defenders and advocates for the wrongly imprisoned have suggested as high as 5%. Several independent studies came up with numbers in between those extremes.
One observation that can be made with some safety based on post conviction exonerations is that the incidence of wrongful conviction is significantly higher in those states with low or no standards for competent criminal defense in court. Thus one is not surprised to discover that Florida and Texas have the highest rates of wrongful convictions based on later reversals in court.
1-3% sounds reasonable.
We just started the sentencing portion of a very heinous case here in CT, where the perp and his still-to-be-tried accomplice crashed into a police car while fleeing the scene of horror they’d left behind, in flames, incinerating the woman they’d just robbed, raped and killed, and suffocating her daughters, bound in their beds and splashed with gasoline. The only survivor was the father, who’d been severely beaten and left for dead, but managed to escape the flames and tried to go for help. There is a 0.00% chance of wrongful conviction here. There has got to be some way of separating this type of case, with its incontrovertible evidence (including DNA on the 11 year old one of the cretins molested), from murkier cases, and see to it that justice is done for the Hawke and Pettit families.
Jon–Thanks for the lecture. See, there is this literary thing called hyperbole. I’m really not quite as stupid as you think. The truth is many people, especially the professional left, want to make it sound like the US criminal justice system is so evil, when it simply is not. As I said, no system is perfect, but were alot better than places like Iran. If you have any involvement with the system you will know that most of the people in jail are not only guilty of what they are in for, but for a whole bunch of other things that got dropped or just weren’t charged.