Because of this woman: Manitoba provincial court Judge Catherine Carlson.
She is the brainiac who sentenced three time convicted child molester Graham James, diddler to the stars, to two years in jail.
Two years in jail, by the by, means that he may be home molesting children by Christmas.
This is why we should elect judges.
WFDS
Dan, sorry that is one of the stupidest things we could do. They do it in the US and get the opposite problem, the state of Virginia did a random study and found 7% false conviction rate.
ReplyDeleteElected judges are afraid to not find you guilty so they won't be seen as soft on crime --- and hence they defer to juries when cases should be dismissed. Elected judges are weak, and easily become tools of the police and right wing politicians.
Sure this result was suboptimal, but I rather have one person do too little time than an entire underclass in jail because of a system corrupted by party politics.
Frankly jailing him is not going to punish him anyway. His real punishment will be that he will always be known as a child molester. Maybe he should have to go door to door ( see http://youtu.be/eyagz4-tQeQ?t=10s )
I have recently had an experience that makes me agree with Dan. For decades I have worked in the law and security field, and only witnesed the justice system from that perspective. I foolishly beleived that for the most part justice was being served fairly. Recently I have witnessed the justce field from the side of a defendant. I was found guilty of something that I did not do, and I am in the process of appealing. In doing research into my case and the judge involved, I found that this judge had a 93% conviction rate and more often than not his rulings are solely based on the testimony given by Police Officers and other people in the law and security field. I also have found that this same judge has a 85% rate of overturned ruling upon appeal. There are many defence lawyers that will not take cases in our district because of these statistics. I have inquired as to why nobody has found these stats disturbing enough to conduct an investigation. I was told by several government employees that due to the fact that Judges are appointed the chance of making any changes are extremely remote and thus making any investigation a huge waste of time.
ReplyDeleteIf judges were elected then not only would their conviction rate come under scrutiny so would their rate of overturn on appeal.