Is Harper planning to restore capital punishment?
He said the Harper government would not seek clemency for Canadians sentenced to capital punishment in those countries.
Not a blessed word appeared in English-Canada about Cannon's announcement in support for the death penalty abroad. It was as if the rest of Canada was totally asleep or hiding out somewhere north of Red Deer, Alberta.
It wasn't a slip-up either. Cannon came back on June 19, the last day of the session, and repeated what had been reported in print, linking the death penalty to Canadian values of liberty, democracy, and human rights....
Cannon repeated that the Harper government would respect "the decisions of sovereign and democratic states" about executing Canadians. He did not mention anything about torture.
Canada abolished the death penalty in 1976, and seeking clemency for Canadians convicted abroad has been automatic ever since.
But in November 2007 the Harper government announced that it would not help Ronald Allen Smith, a Canadian sentenced to death in Montana for killing two natives. Smith is still on death row. Last March a Federal Court ordered Harper to seek clemency for Smith.
A Canadian youth, Mohamed Kohail faces execution by decapitation in Saudi Arabia in the 2007 death of another student in a schoolyard fight in Jeddah. Harper has not lifted a finger to help so far. Does that mean that Saudi Arabia, home of 15 of the 19 New York 9/11 terrorists, is on Cannon's list of "sovereign and democratic" countries?
King Saud would argue that it should be, and he has the oil exports to Canada to prove it, but some refugees might question the "democratic" label for Saudi Arabia. Sharia law is in effect in Saudi Arabia. Was Cannon referring to respect for primacy of "Sharia" law, or did he mean only "Canadian" law? Another problem.
And what about a third Canadian awaiting execution by a firing squad in China who was convicted of something or other that has to do with offending the state, a law that Chinese courts take seriously, at least serious enough to execute him?...
Countries will want to know if they are on Cannon's list of good guy countries whose laws he respects, which means they can execute Canadians at will. And the ones who are not on his list, are going to be awful mad. How agreeable are they going to be to grant his request for clemency?
The new policy may be an indication the Harper government is planning to try to bring back the noose in Canada. It all depends on how well its new "pick-and-choose" policy goes over on the BBQ circuit this summer while the Commons is on holidays.
I'm not sure if Stephen Harper would be foolish enough to do that - it would definitely make him look right-wing and extreme and out of step with moderate Canadians and it would allow the Liberals to take away soft Conservative supporters who are against it.
I don't think Harper wants to risk it.
Bringing back the death penalty is perfectly consistent with the direction this government is being allowed to take. And although foolish, a foolishness perhaps more widely mulled over across our stolen land than we might wish. Look what they're watching on TV. Consider just how many other sacred cows have gone down. Call it "harmonization" or fascist authoritarianism if you prefer. The power of death sentences is attractive to those of a certain slant increasingly common here. And biblical too. Besides, surely it's a case of the chickens coming home to roost? If our brave boys and girls in Afghanistan or Haiti, or Akwesasne get to kill someone, be it by bomb, bullet, taser or torture, then why deny our own Supreme Leader the odd necktie party on us. Death at the hands of the state is a growth industry world wide. The first step is not to defend the citizen in the hands of other jurisdictions, [like Guantanamo, USA, China or Saudi Arabia etc] then once we're used to that kind of "justice", we bring it back home and try it out here. I think it could be a real goer round the barbee this summer...and I think the average canucklhead will buy almost anything if it's sold to him the right way. Seems to..
This jumped out at me as one reason why these monsters could prevail on this just like they have on a growing list of other areas previously thought ring-pass-nots, safely secured:
"It was as if the rest of Canada was totally asleep or hiding out somewhere north of Red Deer Alberta" [or south east or west of] including our 'representatives'.
Seems it's more and more like this whether in the papers or not. Good it's been flagged here. Now we can't say we weren't warned, unfortunately that doesn't necessarily mean anything will change. Just that it could have been...
Why bother when he can simply let his cops shoot to kill?
the rituals of 'due process' and 'rule of law' are politically important I think. Of course they will have your thing too.
Go through the motions of giving the accused a "fair"(?) trial and then hang 'em.
Ignatieff would support the Death Penalty.
I seriously doubt the death penalty will return to Canada in my lifetime. How many countries that have abolished the death penalty have reinstated it?
I'm fairly certain that there are State governments in the U.S. that have abolished capital punishment, and then reinstated it.
What's the current polling on Capital Punishment? I think it's fairly even, probably, and might tip one way or the other depending on if a high profile heinous crime is in the news or not.
A nice wedge issue for Harper to run on, and one that would serve as a nice big shiny ball of tin foil in front of the media cats.
Personally, I'm all in favour of a return to capital punishment.
For Political corruption.
I'm not sure if Stephen Harper would be foolish enough to do that - it would definitely make him look right-wing and extreme and out of step with moderate Canadians and it would allow the Liberals to take away soft Conservative supporters who are against it.
I don't think Harper wants to risk it.
I think it would buy as many Liberal votes as it would lose. (The consensus against the death penalty in Canada is real, but the margin against is razor-thin.) More importantly, such a policy is pure red-meat that can be tossed to the party faithful, who are hungering for proof that Harper will lead them ever-rightward. Without it, their disillusionment with deficits and corporate bailouts might lead them to stay home in droves come election day.
Sadly enough, I think the Conservatives cynical and twisted enough to make such a play.
The odds are at least some of the people we end up hanging will actually be guilty.
As for the innocently executed, well, none of them will be from the the right class and colour of people.
That's why cops, crowns attourney and judges get the big bucks, to enusre mistakes like that only happen to unimportant people.
The new policy may be an indication the Harper government is planning to try to bring back the noose in Canada. It all depends on how well its new "pick-and-choose" policy goes over on the BBQ circuit this summer while the Commons is on holidays.
Richard Cleroux
We are only having this discussion because the Liberals are too chicken shit to bring this government down.
Harper acts as if he has a majority because he has a majority. Or at least the next best thing to a majority...
Capital punishment could not be reinstated without either amending the Charter or invoking the notwithstanding clause, and there's approximately zero chance that either of those would be done over an issue that contentious.
Certainly California did. Charles Manson's sentence was commuted in that window. And didn't Illinois relatively recently establish a moratorium on the death penalty?
Was it abolished or are we talking about moratoria? Two very different things.
Never knew capital punishment was in the Charter.
Section 7 of the Charter protects the right to life, which Canadian courts have consistently upheld, which means that Canadian courts would never allow capital punishment to be reinstated. That's why the Charter would have to be modified or the Conservatives would have to invoke the notwithstanding clause to override the courts.
Was it abolished or are we talking about moratoria? Two very different things.
In Illinois, it was a moratorium. Capital punishment is still on the books there but the (probably now former) governor issued a moritorium on executions, I believe in the wake of a death row inmate being exonerated by DNA evidence.
I know that the Manson death sentence was overturned by a Supreme Court ruling which, I guess, was subsequently appealed and overturned, bringing capital punishment back.
My understanding, and I could be wrong, is that the U.S. Supreme Court has said that capital punishment is acceptable and that individual states can make their own decision as to whether to use it in their state.
Wikipedia discusses the 1972-76 suspension of the death penalty in the US here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_United_States
Something something the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
It reads:
Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of the person, and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.
http://www.pch.gc.ca/ddp-hrd/canada/guide/lgl-eng.cfm
However, there is much room for Harper to manover me thinks, seeing as how his phone and internet tapping, Bill proposals break Section 8.
Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure.
I would say Section 12, now that I am reading it,is applicable capital punishment too:
Everyone has the right not to be subjected to any cruel and unusual treatment or punishment.
But wow, IMV is there oblique skewing going on in the examples beneath some of the sections. For example this follows Sec 12;
Except that the Supreme Court has already ruled that it would violate the Charter.
See:
http://www.biblio.uottawa.ca/content-page.php?g=en&s=ftx&c=abt-gccp-hist
While the case that The Bish cites - Burns and Rafay - did not specifically deal with the death penalty in Canada, practically all scholars agree that the imposition of capital punishment would now be found to violate the principles of fundamental justice (the standard that is set out in section 7). That being the case it would be virtually impossible to justify the violation of section 7 under section 1 as the Supreme Court has said for 25 years that only in extreme situations -war, national emergencies et cetera - could a "free and democratic society" ever tolerate a departure from the principles of fundamental justice.
I agree that the only way to reimpose capital punishment and be sure that it would stick is to invoke the notwithstanding clause. It would be like trying to legalize torture.
I disagree.
I believe it is an overstatement to say that "capital punishment was held unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada, likely ruling out any possibility of its reinstatement in the future" in 2001 (the case was United States v. Burns).
That was an extradition case, where Burns argued that extradition to the United States would violate his constitutional rights under the Charter unless the Minister of Justice sought assurances from the requesting U.S. jurisdiction that the death penalty would be off the table. Although the Supreme Court had ruled 10 years earlier in two very similar cases that the Minister could extradite to death-penalty jurisdictions without seeking assurances, this time they reversed themselves, without actually acknowledging that the earlier cases were wrongly decided.
Who is to say that if the matter came up again they would not once again rule the other way? In fact the court expressly left that option open: Assurances, they said, are "constitutionally required in all but exceptional cases". [my emphasis]
In any event, it was not the death penalty per se that the court found unconstitutional, but the extradition without assurances. The Court did not rule that the death penalty was unconstitutional.
The court placed a great deal of emphasis on the fact that capital punishment had been abolished in Canada by Parliament. This made it contradictory for the government to extradite fugitives without assurances that they would not be subject to the death penalty.
But this reveals the nasty sting in the scorpion's tail: If Parliament were to reinstate the death penalty, perhaps for a very limited number of offences, one of the cornerstones of the Burns case would be gone. The Supreme Court might then very well take a different view of how "fundamental" abolitionism is to Canadian civic values.
We aren't talking about section 12, though, we're talking about section 7, and on section 7 the ruling is clear:
And perhaps more importantly
(emphasis added)
The ruling also did not emphasise that abolition had been implemented by Parliament, but that it had been upheld by successive governments over a period of approximately 40 years. It was not just the law, but the law which had withstood the test of time. And, in fact, the ruling is quite clear that vacillations in public opinion were not something the court should take into account when making its ruling.
Whoops, hit the quote button instead of the edit button.
I don't know if you were specifically responding to me, MS, but I acknolwedged that the case did not deal specifically with the death penalty in Canada.
I still think that the Court is very unlikely to find that capital punishment accords with the principles of fundamental justice. It is possible, of course, but is rendered very doubtful by the Court's section 7 jurisprudence. The Court can change its mind, but there is precious little evidence that it would.
The Court's refusal to deal with section 12 says little about its attitude to the death penalty per se. Section 7 was simply chosen as the more appropriate vehicle of analysis. It is not as though section 12 is stronger than section 7. If anything, I would say the oppsite.
A better indicator of its attitude is revealed by the fact that Burns overturned a previous decision wherein the Court ruled that extradition without assusrances would not violate section 7. That case (Kindler) was also decided after Parliament had abolished the death penalty.
A better indicator of the Court's attitude is revealed in everything following the first sentence of the portion you quoted.
A move by Parliament to reinstitute the death penalty COULD factor into the Court's analysis of fundamental justice which does rely in part on the existence of a "societal consensus" that a principle is required for the proper and fair functioning of the judicial system. But the Court has, many times, said that "societal consensus" is not determined solely by the prevailing popular opinion.
We aren't talking about section 12, though, we're talking about section 7, and on section 7 the ruling is clear:
Indeed it is clear: It is the extradition without assurances that (in all but "exceptional" cases) is a denial of fundamental justice under Section 7 - not the death penalty per se.
This is based not only on the fact that Canada is an abolitionist state, but on four additional factors that the court elaborated:
1. At the international level, the abolition of the death penalty has emerged as a major Canadian initiative. (How much of a factor that would be today is questionable, given the Harper government's decided lack of enthusiasm for upholding abolitionist policies here and abroad).
2. The relative youth of the fugitives at the time of the offences is a mitigating circumstance, albeit slight.
3. The epidemic throughout the 1990's of revelations of wrongful convictions in murder cases, both in Canada and the USA, weighed heavily on the court's mind.
4. The "death row phenomenon" of lengthy pre-execution delays and associated psychological trauma was considered by the court to be a relevant consideration.
All five considerations taken together tipped the balance, in the court's view, in favour of requiring assurances. It was not just a simple matter of saying the death penalty itself was a violation of s. 7.
You're just reiterating the same point here, since the first sentence you quoted is actually the Heading of that section of the judgment that contains the second sentence you quoted.
Upheld by successive governments? Upheld by not restoring the DP? Does that amount to "upholding"?
In actuality, the death penalty has been treated with varying degrees of disdain and support by successive governments in the past 40 years. The 1991 and 2001 Supreme Court cases on extradition with or without assurances were precipitated by different federal governments that refused to seek assurances in extradition cases. Is that your idea of upholding the abolition of capital punishment?
In 1987 public opinion polls showed a majority in favour of reinstating the death penalty. A motion to reintroduce capital punishment was made by a Tory government backbencher and ultimately defeated on a free vote. Does allowing a free vote on the death penalty constitute "upholding" the abolitionist viewpoint?
And it wasn't until 11 years ago that the death penalty was removed from the National Defence Act for military crimes.
Now, to what extent can we say that abolition has been "upheld" by the Harper government in the last 3 years? Not much, in my view.
Yes, the court always says that, but in the Burns case it was clear that the court was reacting to the public's loss of confidence in the justice system as a result of the wrongful convictions of Donald Marshall, Guy Paul Morin, David Milgaard, Thomas Sophonow, etc. etc.
If public opinion were strongly in favour of the death penalty for, say, acts of "terrorism" (perhaps as a result of some yet-to-occur terrorist scare) and the feds brought back the noose for acts it defines as terrorism, I have no confidence the Supreme Court would strike down the law.
I don't know if you were specifically responding to me, MS, but I acknolwedged that the case did not deal specifically with the death penalty in Canada.
No, I wasn't.
A better indicator of its attitude is revealed by the fact that Burns overturned a previous decision wherein the Court ruled that extradition without assusrances would not violate section 7. That case (Kindler) was also decided after Parliament had abolished the death penalty.
As I pointed out, the court didn't actually acknowledge that the Kindler and Ng cases were wrongly decided. It didn't "overturn" those decisions or disapprove them. All it said was that in the Burns case, the relevant factors tipped the balance in the other direction. So who's to say which way the balance would tip next time? That's one of the reasons why the Supreme Court is so infuriating.
But the Court has, many times, said that "societal consensus" is not determined solely by the prevailing popular opinion.
Yes, they say that every time they make an unpopular decision. But when popular opinion is on their side, they don't shrink from using it as a relevant factor to consider, as they did in Burns.
New Mexico abolished the death penalty in March.
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson signed legislation repealing the state's death penalty.
"Regardless of my personal opinion about the death penalty, I do not have confidence in the criminal justice system as it currently operates to be the final arbiter when it comes to who lives and who dies for their crime," Richardson said in a statement Wednesday.
He noted that more than 130 death row inmates have been exonerated in the past 10 years, including four in New Mexico.
"Faced with the reality that our system for imposing the death penalty can never be perfect, my conscience compels me to replace the death penalty with a solution that keeps society safe," he said.
With the governor's decision, New Mexico joins 14 other states that don't impose the death penalty. Several other states, including Colorado, Kansas, Maryland and Montana, are considering changes to their capital punishment laws.
A better indicator of its attitude is revealed by the fact that Burns overturned a previous decision wherein the Court ruled that extradition without assusrances would not violate section 7. That case (Kindler) was also decided after Parliament had abolished the death penalty.
As I pointed out, the court didn't actually acknowledge that the Kindler and Ng cases were wrongly decided. It didn't "overturn" those decisions or disapprove them. All it said was that in the Burns case, the relevant factors tipped the balance in the other direction. So who's to say which way the balance would tip next time? That's one of the reasons why the Supreme Court is so infuriating.
But the Court has, many times, said that "societal consensus" is not determined solely by the prevailing popular opinion.
Yes, they say that every time they make an unpopular decision. But when popular opinion is on their side, they don't shrink from using it as a relevant factor to consider, as they did in Burns.
I think that is an exceptionally narrow reading of Burns and its relationship to Kindler. FWIW Peter Hogg characterizes Burns as an "overruling" in Constitutional Law of Canada, ch.47.10(b). (In fairness I should add that he shares your cyncicsm about the Court, albeit from a somewhat different direction.) Heck, I'm pretty cynical about the Court - just not on this issue. Overruling sub silentio is a time-honoured tradition.
I don't disagree that the Court manipulates situations, evidence etc to its political advantage.
Ignatieff would support the Death Penalty.
I don't think he would.
...he'd torture them, instead.
I think he would, he approves of torture afterall.
LOL LTJ, you got there quicker, I guessyou have high speed!
Whether Ignatieff would personally support capital punishment and whether it would be pragmatic for the leader of the Liberal Party to publically say so are two very different issues, though. I can't imagine the party would adopt a pro-death penalty position and alienate a significant portion of their voting base.
Whether Ignatieff would personally support capital punishment and whether it would be pragmatic for the leader of the Liberal Party to publically say so are two very different issues, though. I can't imagine the party would adopt a pro-death penalty position and alienate a significant portion of their voting base.
Exactly. This is what I was getting at above. There is no way the leader of the Liberal Party is going to support capital punishment as a policy.
There are some posts above joking about Iggy being a torture freak, but if we are going to discuss this seriously, the reality is that Iggy ain't supporting it.
I seriously doubt the death penalty will return to Canada in my lifetime.
No kidding.
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Eleutherophobics of the World...Unite!!!
Iggy Thumscrews likes to play both ends, so I think his policy would be to only kill a person dead enough to please the pro capital punishment crowd, but not kill them dead enough to upset the anti-capital punishment crowd.
Which, when you boil it all down, means a life sentence watching Ben Mulroney on T.V.
Iggy Thumscrews likes to play both ends, so I think his policy would be to only kill a person dead enough to please the pro capital punishment crowd, but not kill them dead enough to upset the anti-capital punishment crowd.
Which, when you boil it all down, means a life sentence watching Ben Mulroney on T.V.
_______________________________________
Eleutherophobics of the World...Unite!!!
Iggy Thumscrews likes to play both ends, so I think his policy would be to only kill a person dead enough to please the pro capital punishment crowd, but not kill them dead enough to upset the anti-capital punishment crowd.
That's kind of clever. I like it.
Do we even have to ask if Harpie will bring back the death penalty? All the old reformers are probably salivating to do it once they get a majority.
This should get the pulse up on both state-sanctioned murder advocates and firearm fans:
Utah firing squad executes U.S. killerRonnie Lee Gardner, 49, was the first person to be executed by firing squad in 14 years in the United States.
Gardner was convicted in 1985 for murdering attorney Michael Buddell during a failed attempt to escape from a courthouse, where he was facing another murder charge.
The execution came after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Gardner's final appeal.
Utah Gov. Gary Herbert also rejected a request to temporarily stay the execution, saying in a statement that Gardner had a "full and fair opportunity to have his case considered by numerous tribunals."
"I just gave the go-ahead to corrections director to proceed with Gardner's execution. May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims," Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff said in a message posted on Twitter ahead of the execution.
He was pronounced dead at 12:17 a.m. local time, officials said.
If I had committed a capital offense and was going to be executed, this is the way I'd want to go: "No blindfold, no cigarette and don't tie me up. Please and thank you."