It’s about time we reformed our legal system . hell, it’s been around for 1000 years or so and we still have lots of crime, don’t we?
The bottom line of our system has been the presumption of innocence ignoring the reality that if you get arrested, you must be guilty. Policemen are well trained, unfailingly honest, and meticulous in their investigations. As our Moms and Dads told us, the policeman is our friend.
It all started with Magna Carta in 1215 and the wooly-headed attitude of the law has worsened as we go. The pandering to criminals was sanctified and etched in stone in a 1935 case called Woolmington v. DPP, where Viscount Sankey made his famous “Golden thread” speech:
“Throughout the web of the English Criminal Law one golden thread is always to be seen, that it is the duty of the prosecution to prove the prisoner’s guilt. The principle that the prosecution must prove the guilt of the prisoner is part of the common law of England and no attempt to whittle it down can be entertained”.
Can you imagine that?
Because some toffee-nosed English aristocrat in, would you believe, the House of Lords?, re-affirmed all those years of mollycoddling criminals we in Canada (and the United States as well as Commonwealth countries) have followed his judicial
nonsense!
I’m proud to know that my province has laid that presumption of innocence twaddle firmly to rest.
In Mission, an enlightened City Council charges people for inspection by the police when they invade one’s house looking for “grow op”.
At the same time that prime example of abstention from alcohol, Gordon Campbell has streamlined the system of cutting out the middle man in impaired driving cases. Campbell (that photo showing him in jail for drunk driving was a phony just as the fact that a bunch of planes killed 3500 people on 9/11 was). No more tiresome trials, no more need to enforce penalties, your friendly cop will do that for you – he will arrest, judge and enforce all in a few seconds. Pish and tush on you limp-wristed civil rightsers who point out that these are the same people who
tasered a man to death, have doctored evidence which sent three innocent men, Marshall, Moran and Milgaard, to jail for life for murders they didn’t commit, and seem to be constantly beating up suspects. None of these things are important because, of course, this must be remembered – they have experience from judging and acquitting their colleagues.
As this new and long overdue revamping of criminal law takes hold, there will be an attack on “crime-symps” who will oppose police breaking into homes in the middle of the night, without warrants, looking for stolen goods, or perhaps dirty pictures on hard drives. We have to meet these objections head on.
Why not in the middle of the night? That’s when these people will all be home.
Who needs a warrant? After all, if you’re innocent, you’ve nothing to worry about.
The opinions and actions of our police should not be scrutinized because sometimes guilty people “get off”. We must start teaching our kids the maxim “it is better to convict 1000 innocent men rather than let one guilty person go free…”
Yes, gentle readers, you can trust your friendly cop much more than those silly courts full of crooked lawyers and wooly-headed judges.
Aux barricades!
Bring back the noose! Let us return to those sensible frontier days when a cop and a mob made innocent people safe in their beds!
And we should all thank the Mission Council and Gordon Campbell for bringing us to our senses and starting down the slope that ultimately brings those bad people directly from an night in jail to the lynch mob and the hanging tree.
What a(n) (im)modest proposal!
Good article.
All best, Dave
There is definitely something wrong in the judicial system. It’s been going in this direction for some time and well past time for the pendulum to swing in another direction…but which way?
On the one hand you can be charged, judged, and convicted at the roadside by a constable, on the other you can kill someone with your car while drunk and serve virtually no time. There is no sense in the system.
Canada does NOT have a justice system; we have a LAWYER system. Most “judges” are, or were, lawyers; and the only people who benefit from the Lawyer system are LAWYERS.
The courts are set up to serve the LAWYERS, and the political “elite”; who appoint “judges”. They all drink each other’s dirty bath water and scratch each others back; and the peasants pay through the nose, in fees, fines, and taxes.
I hope this article is in jest and that the reader realizes it.
I really think that Terrence is on to something !
I agree with Terrence.The leagal limit is .08.Unless the law is changed to .05 the police should not be given the right to hand out fines [beond the 24 suspentions].