Blue Like You

Archive for the ‘Crime’ Category

Did anyone else see Liberal senator Sharon Carstairs on Mike Duffy Live tonight?

Please! I need to vent.

Related: Tories threaten election over crime bill - CTV

Halls of Macadamia - Hey Steffi…

ChuckerCanuk - Liberal Senate: “Don’t You Raise That Age of Consent!”

Why is it that most of us feel some kind of extra revulsion when a pregnant woman is murdered, but yet the Canadian public is so reluctant to call for additional punishment for the perpetrators?

The Unborn Victims of Crime Bill is still being bogged down by opposition parties and abortion activists who fear it is a slippery slope to the notion of ‘personhood’ for the fetus.

Perish the thought.

In other news, Kiera Tetley, who was only about one month away from being born, was murdered in Winnipeg on Tuesday, along with her mother Joanne Nadine Hoeppner.

Mother and sister now dead:

Tacked on the fridge of the battered green house was an image from a recent ultrasound of Hoeppner’s fetus, showing hair, and a photo of her one-year-old son. Hoeppner wanted to regain custody of him from the foster home where he lives.

Where is your conscience, Canada?

Jeff Allan asks that question this morning.

What do you think?

Has the vicious fatal stabbing of Stephanie Rengel finally made you say, “Enough is enough?”

Joe Warmington thinks so - Enough of this ‘hug-a-thug’ approach.

Now I’ll just sit back and wait for reader Gayle to chime in.

Darcey has a fascinating discussion going on at DMB about so-called ‘Honour Killings’.

Author Ellen R. Sheeley has left a comment that is well worth the read:

Imam Shakir is being disingenuous and playing to the cultural/moral relativists, of which there seem to be plenty.

Aqsa Parvez’s death was an “honor” killing, and “honor” killings will never be properly addressed if people aren’t even willing to admit to what they are. They are a form of domestic violence, but a very specific form, with different roots, different triggers, different modus operandi, and different ways of preventing them…

I am planning to pick up this thread sometime in the near future, since these issues now appear to be affecting Canada.

The murder of Hunter Brown and subsequent arrest of Trevor Lapierre underscores the desperate need for more mental health funding.

In today’s Record (Families of people with mental illness often have little influence over care), Christiane Sadeler, executive Director of the Community Safety & Crime Prevention Council states:

…it’s clear that Lapierre is “a very troubled young man. I must admit I was a little puzzled to see he was discharged,” she said.

She said when mental health legislation was changed, community supports were to be put in place. “I would claim there is not nearly enough,” she said.

Of course, we all know by now that most of our so-called health tax goes to general revenues.

Sadeler also critiques our legal system as it pertains to the mentally ill:

“Families are in a difficult position because of the current mental health legislation,” she said. “They can encourage and support, but they have no capacity to have someone detained.”

She said the original intent of changes made more than a decade ago to the Mental Health Act was “to ensure over-containment of people with mental health issues doesn’t happen.

“Maybe the legislation, in some cases goes, beyond what was originally intended.”

Where is Dalton McGuinty’s voice in all this?

The complex protocol required for admission to an acute psychiatric unit is also detailed in the article. An accompanying piece shows how much police time goes into dealing with the mentally ill.

Clearly, something needs to be done to improve the system in terms of funding for beds and community support, as well as possibly another look into revamping the Ontario Mental Health Act to facilitate the process for getting help for people who are so troubled and irrational that they don’t realize how badly they need mental health care.

Just a four year sentence - for this????

Friday Update: Post - Father who abused daughter, live on the Internet, gets four years.

This one is very revealing - ‘Disgusting’ sentence for abusive father.

Paul Gillespie, the chief executive of Kids Internet Safety Alliance, said the sentence should have been closer to 10 to 20 years, not four.

“I think this sentence is absolutely disgusting,” he said. “The fact that in the real time he will probably be out of custody in less than 12 months is something that even by Canadian standards is absolutely disgraceful.”

CBC - 4-year sentence for online sexual abuser a ’slap on the wrist’: Tory.

TABaker - Not enough.

Unambig - 34 Months In Jail For Raping His Daughter Live On Internet?

Christie Blatchford - Child Porn. Why don’t the punishments fit the crime? Via Dr. Roy.

The Record gives some insight into the mental state of Trevor LaPierre, who has been charged in the murder of Kitchener senior Hunter Brown - He heard ‘voices of demons’. I was ready to blame the parents, but it seems they were aware of how unstable LaPierre was. The system appears to be the real culprit here.

“I knew he was off the wall,” a shaken Paul La Pierre said outside court yesterday before his 22-old-son made his first appearance.

“I realized the severity of the situation. He’d been using insane language and acting like he was a victim of everything.”

(Update at end.)

This tragic story about the seemingly random murder of local resident Hunter Brown has been haunting me - Who murdered Hunter Brown?

Bad enough to have it happen anytime, but at Christmas it is especially poignant and disturbing. I can’t imagine the horrors this family must be going through right now. As his son said on the local news yesterday, he didn’t deserve to go that way.

This senior was the epitome of the Christmas spirit. He was killed as he set out on his traditional delivery of Christmas cards to his neighbours.

And of course there was the recent sad story about the woman who was killed by the snow plough near London. A horrible accident.

Please give your family members a big hug every day. You just never know.

Let’s hope Ken Epp has a bit more success than Leon Benoit getting some legislation through to protect Unborn Victims of Crime and their mothers who have chosen to follow through with the pregnancy.

I think there is a lot of grassroots support out there for this bill. Ironically, it was the Conservative government itself that squashed Benoit’s efforts. Perhaps it was afraid of a pro-choice backlash, but I firmly believe this is not a mutually exclusive initiative. With the right wording, I think the law can protect a woman’s right to choose whether she decides to abort her pregnancy or not. If she chooses to give birth to her baby and someone then commits an act of violence to destroy her unborn child, there should be a punishment for that.

Whatever your political stripes, please contact your MP and let him or her know that you support Bill C-484 (Unborn Victim of Crimes Act).

It’s the least we can do for these grieving families.

They deserve closure.

Excellent essay in today’s National Post by Dr. Margaret Somerville - New Life Matters.

The topic of pregnant women and their unborn babies being murdered is not going to go away. In Canada, however, we only recognize the murder of the mother in a legal sense. Dr. Somerville is challenging this concept along moral and ethical lines.

She cites statistics showing that a majority of Canadians support some kind of legal protection for the unborn:

In short, many Canadians’ moral intuition is that “there ought to be a law” — or laws — protecting fetuses from some harms, although we don’t all agree on what those laws should be, especially in the context of abortion. Presently in Canada, there is no express abortion law.

So given that the majority of Canadians feel that there should be some type of protection, but there is also the fear that abortion ‘rights’ may compromised.

Somerville delineates the ethical dilemma here:

But willful blindness is not an ethical approach to dealing with abortion.

Seeing the fetus as an unborn victim of crime strips away the medical cloak that abortion places on the taking of its life, a cloak that dulls our moral intuition as to what is involved. It causes us to see the fetus as what it is, an early human life. Those who support abortion must be able to square that fact with their belief that abortion is ethical in certain circumstances.

Regarding abortion, she suggests that at the very least we need to ensure that women who choose to have an abortion do so with eyes wide open as to the pain that could be inflicted upon the unborn:

A “Fetal Pain Awareness Act,” similar to those some American states have enacted, could require a physician to inform the woman, before performing an abortion, that scientific evidence suggests that after 20 weeks gestation the fetus can feel pain. Furthermore, she would have to be offered anaesthesia for the fetus, which it would be her choice to take or decline. This type of law would not prohibit abortion; rather, its goal is to try to prevent the fetus from dying in excruciating pain. After all, even jurisdictions that allow capital punishment prohibit certain forms of it on the grounds that they are cruel. Likewise, we have criminal laws that protect animals from brutal treatment.

Does this seem reasonable? Why wouldn’t we want to offer a woman the opportunity to terminate her child in a somewhat more humane manner?

Oh, I know. If we can’t see it, then it can’t feel pain, right?