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BLACK-SHEEP COMMENTARIES SLASHERS’ SENTENCING MUST BE APPEALED ON Oct. 24 Judge Judy Gedye meted out two-year conditional sentences to two young women, Ashley Parry and Danielle Sorensen, for their horrific and completely unprovoked aggravated assault of another young woman, Ashley Lindsell. The imposition of these make-believe jail sentences took place 18 months after charges were laid and six months after the accused terminated their preliminary hearing with guilty pleas. Delay of this magnitude is completely unacceptable. It accommodated everyone but the victim. Aggravated assault is an offence with a maximum punishment of 14 years. On the facts of this case it was one step short of murder. It will be a travesty of justice if the sentences aren’t appealed. On April 17, 2005, Parry and Sorensen went into a washroom at the Lynwood Pub in North Vancouver where they encountered Lindsell. After some accusatory words directed at Lindsell, Parry and Sorensen began punching and kicking her. In this melee one of them smashed a beer bottle on a counter and plunged the jagged remnant into Lindsell’s neck narrowly missing a carotid artery. At that precise moment one of Lindsell’s companions entered the washroom and saw Sorensen holding a broken beer bottle. “All I saw was Ashley (Lindsell) on the floor with blood gushing from her neck,” Robert Jones told the North Shore News. A split-second psychopathic act of senseless and sadistic violence transformed Lindsell’s pleasant evening, and her life, into a never-ending nightmare. She was sickened by the stabbing and the sight of her own blood; hurt and angry while in the hospital; anguished during the healing of her injuries; depressed by the way the case was conducted; demeaned during cross examination at the preliminary inquiry; outraged by the flippant attitude of her attackers in and around the courthouse; and extremely dismayed over the fact that sentencing was so long delayed and entirely predictable. As reported by the News, Judge Gedye described the Lynnwood attack as a “very ugly assault.” “It’s unprovoked. It’s vicious,’ she said, adding, “I think this is just a fraction away from having (been) a murder.” Speaking to Lindsell’s mother Gedye said, “There’s nothing we can do to make what happened to your daughter disappear. …It would have been a terrifying incident.” What Gedye didn’t comment on and probably didn’t know was the fact that after the attack Lindsell was kept in hospital for several agonizing days while the extent of her wounds was determined and treated surgically, followed by a 48-hour watch over her to rule out any complications. It was an agony shared by her mother. The News further reported that Gedye said she had to balance concern for the victim with what is best for society and what would be an appropriate sentence for Sorensen and Parry, noting neither of them had a previous history of violence. Did Gedye fully comprehend Lindsell’s ghastly trauma? Does the use of conditional sentencing reveal that her ultimate concern was the well being of two criminals? Assiduous concern for convicted persons is not the invocation of mercy as part of the sentencing process. Rather, it distorts the role of judges and avoids the due regard and purpose of the criminal law, being, at least notionally, to protect law-abiding citizens. The measure of a sentence should never intensify what for many victims has been a life sentence imposed on them by a criminal. Each victim is the luckless surrogate of the rest of society, and the suffering of each victim of crime haunts all of us because we know that, but for the grace of God, it could have been us. Each time a criminal is coddled, the predators among us take comfort. In past years, the most critical point in a criminal case was the imposition of a fit sentence. It was a daunting last act in which the judge mustered up courage to look, unblinking, into the eyes of the convicted criminal, fully aware that everyone in the courtroom, watching hawk-like, was absorbing each word to discern whether the jail sentence would be two years less a day in Oakalla Prison or a longer stretch in the British Columbia Penitentiary. Those times are long gone. Today, most judges nestle in a downy vacuum of judicial abstraction in which their watchword and guiding principle is “anything but jail.” They proselytize their self-willed notion that time in jail deepens criminality and precludes rehabilitation. Conditional sentences are nothing more than probation orders on steroids; empty abstractions that exclude consideration of public order and safety. By denying justice to victims, they create a perception of utter failure in our system of law enforcement. Only too soon will that perception bring on increasing acts of vigilantism. The source of our individual liberty is an abstract concept: The Rule of Law. So long as we are denied vigorous enforcement of the Criminal Code together with the imposition of fit sentences that shelter us from violence and property crime the Rule of Law is meaningless. In my opinion, the judiciary, a branch of government, is perilously close to willful blindness. An increasing emphasis on suspended and conditional sentences as part of an anything-but-jail philosophy has produced the disaster of revolving-door justice, well oiled by rampant plea bargaining. The judiciary has to return to its constitutional duty, stated so well in 1984 by Brian Dickson, then chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada: “One of the key rights in our society is the individual’s right to be free from unconsented invasions of his or her physical security or dignity and it is a central purpose of the criminal law to protect members of society from such invasions.” The sentence imposed by Gedye is wrong: it does a serious injustice to Ashley Lindsell; it is an affront to all law-abiding citizens and it must be appealed. Wallace G Craig – wallace-gilby-craig@realjustice.ca – NS News – Jan 18, 07 |
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