Poll says Canadians think justice system is too lenient, so Liberals, NDP and the CBC say Canadians must be reeducated

In a move that is entirely typical of the delusional arrogance of Canada's leftist political establishment, their response to a poll indicating that a majority of Canadians have lost confidence in the justice system is not to fix the system but to want to reeducate the pubic to be satisfied with it.

An internal study conducted by the Justice Department and obtained by the Canadian Press  "concludes the public believes victims are too often ignored in the justice system, and that prisons do a poor job of rehabilitating offenders."

The Conservative government has committed to introducing legislation to impose tougher mandatory sentences for crimes such as sex offenses against children and for the system to place more importance on the right of victims. But Opposition critics in the NDP and Liberal parties, as well as some federal bureaucrats argue that declining rates of crime in some areas mean that Canadians need to be "educated" about the virtues of the existing system.

These opposition critics probably do not live in crime-ridden areas of Toronto, however one or two may represent areas of Vancouver where during elections, junkies are reportedly given sandwiches   and are bussed to polling stations with instructions to cast a vote for a particular candidate.

Remarkably, in its usual effort to spin the news to its own biases, the CBC reported this story as "Canadians think fix for courts lies in education, report says" implying it it is not a small number of politicians and bureaucrats and CBC wonks who think that, but the majority of Canadians who in fact hold the opposite view.

This CBC headline implies the exact opposite of the study's conclusion

Kathleen Wynne's Ontario - Idle No More lawbreakers get a free pass from prosecution

 

TORONTO - In a rare move for a police chief, OPP Commissioner Chris Lewis says he "disagrees" with a decision by the Napanee Crown attorney to not bring to trial charges against several First Nations protesters in January's Idle No More rail blockade near Marysville.

"A thorough investigation was conducted by our criminal investigators," Lewis acknowledged this week. "They felt strongly that grounds to charge a number of the key protesters criminally existed, particularly given that this blockade was more than a brief inconvenience to a few people."

But, sources told the Toronto Sun, even with a police decision to lay charges the Crown rejected the notion.

Another miscarriage of justice courtesy of Angela Corey, the Florida State's Attorney who prosecuted George Zimmerman

(CBS News) JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - A Florida woman who fired warning shots against her allegedly abusive husband has been sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Marissa Alexander of Jacksonville had said the state's "Stand Your Ground" law should apply to her because she was defending herself against her allegedly abusive husband when she fired warning shots inside her home in August 2010. She told police it was to escape a brutal beating by her husband, against whom she had already taken out a protective order.

A failure of justice

The heartbreaking story of Rehtaeh Parsons, who killed herself in the aftermath of a gang rape points to a justice system that completely failed her.

There are other culprits as well, most obviously the rapists. Her ordeal was compounded by deplorable people in her community who rather than offer support, taunted her through social media.

But when someone sends around pictures of a 15 year old being raped, it is distribution of child pornography and there should have been prosecutions.

We need tougher sentencing for sexual assault in this country and police who prosecute violent felons instead of concentrating on those who give cultural offense.

More on this here and here

Important lessons from the Nortel trial

On Jan. 14, 2013, nearly nine years after the claimed fraud was alleged to have occurred, Ontario Superior Court Judge Frank Marrocco dismissed all charges against former Nortel Networks Corporation chief executive Frank Dunn as well as former chief financial officer Douglas Beatty and former controller Michael Gollogly.

All three executives were accused of defrauding Nortel and the public by deliberately misrepresenting Nortel’s financial results between 2001 and 2004, in order to maximize corporate bonuses due to them. The demise of Nortel — a telecom giant — is complex and the context of the telecommunications industry at that time is important to a deeper and more penetrating understanding of what went wrong.

More on this item from Terrence Corcoran at the Financial Post

Nortel Fraud Trial Verdict due today

Three men accused of perpetrating the largest fraud in Canadian Securities history are anxiously awaiting to hear whether Judge Frank Marrocco will decide that their lives and reputations are ruined or if they are the victims of a politicized and inept prosecution case.

The judge will most likely not frame the case in those terms, but over the course of a lengthy, expensive trail, the prosecution has not offered a shred of actual evidence that former Nortel executives Frank Dunn, Douglas Beatty and Michael Gollogly conspired to commit fraud. Indeed, a great deal of evidence was offered by the defense to establish that everything the defendants did at Nortel was disclosed to and had the approval of the firm's auditors, Delloite and Touche.

The RCMP unit that gathered the evidence for the Nortel case is feeling apprehension about the outcome, as the only major conviction the ever secured was the slam-dunk Drabinsky fraud trial. The apparent reason for Nortel's ills was the legal, if stupid spending spree on ultimately near-worthless dot-com investments that the Board made before the executives on trail headed the company. The Nortel collapse was the biggest financial tumble in Canada, and will billions lost to investors, there was enormous pressure to find scapegoats and the Board was hardly likely to offer themselves up.

The Ottawa Citizen's James Bagnall is at the University Avenue courthouse this morning and will be live tweeting updates. The Globe and Mail has a crew live tweeting too.

UPDATE: THE VERDICT IS IN:

NOT GUILTY!

Just as Eye on a Crazy Planet has been predicting for the last year

Let the games begin! Rob Ford can run in the next by-election

Wow! Looks like I may get to vote for Rob again sooner than I thought...

In a huge victory for the administration Mayor Rob Ford is eligible to run in a by-election.

Justice Charles Hackland has agreed to remove a portion of his decision that suggested Ford would be ineligible until 2014.

This news came in a conference call with lawyers for both parties acting in the conflict-of-interest case Friday morning.

Toronto police and Ontario prosecutors - working hard to undermine confidence in the justice system

Aside from arresting and prosecuting criminals, the job of the police and court system in a democracy is to maintain public confidence in the idea that the state is interested in the administration of justice.

A number of actions by Toronto police and prosecutors in the last few months have only served to undermine faith in our law enforcement and judicial institutions.

The was the case of David Chen, the proprietor of the Lucky Moose store, who was arrested and prosecuted, and after great expense acquitted, following his detention of a serial thief who preyed upon him.

Last month, there was the instance of a man and his dog who were both assaulted by Khomeinist goons at a Queen's Park demonstration calling for the destruction of Israel. Rather than arrest the followers of the totalitarians in Iran who committed the assault, the arrested the victim and threatened to lock him up for a weekend.

Former Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant never has to face a trial following his killing of an enraged, violent bicycle courier with his car. Bryant was probably not guilty of manslaughter, but Moses Mahilal was certainly defending himself and his family when he fought off an intruder in his girlfriend's mother's house, yet unlike the influential former politician, seems headed for a criminal trial.

Moses Mahilal and his girlfriend, Sarah Walsh, sensed trouble as they entered her mother’s house just after 3 a.m. on July 31, 2011, and found the side door ajar. 

They became even more alarmed when they saw a large pair of black, high-top Air Jordans at the bottom of the staircase leading to the second floor, where her mother, Kimberly Walsh, was asleep.   

Mahilal, 26, made a beeline for the kitchen, grabbed a large knife and ran upstairs, where he confronted the intruder hiding behind the door of Kimberly Walsh’s bedroom.   

Within minutes, the wounded intruder, Kino Johnson, 33, was gone, and hours later Mahilal, was under arrest and charged with aggravated assault. A preliminary hearing is set for Sept. 11.

Moses Mahilal under arrest for defending his girlfriend and
her mother from a confessed felon who broke into their home

The contempt engendered by the perception of a two-tiered justice system in Ontario can do untold harm to the ability of the police and judiciary to enforce the law.  When aggrieved, self-proclaimed victim groups comprised of thugs, professional criminals, and influence peddlers get preferential treatment by police and the courts and honest citizens have to endure unfair prosecutions, the result will be less respect for the police and court system.

Ontario's democratic society is owed better than that.

Former Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant tries to come back from a wreck

Former Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryan's story is a tragedy of remarkable proportions. A evening out with his wife ended with the mangled body of a deeply disturbed bicycle courier on the street of Toronto after a haywire attempt by Bryant to shake the infuriated former mental patient from his convertible. That night was also seemingly the end of what was considered one of the most promising political careers in Canada.

I've met Bryant and his wife a few times. He was my Member of Provincial Parliament, and his wife Susan was a colleague of a very good friend of mine at a law firm. They are both decent, intelligent people.

The tragedy that affected the families of the politician and the courier were unexpected for the former and almost inevitable for the latter. Darcy Allan Sheppard had a history of mental illness from the time he was a child. He had serious addiction problems and earlier in the night he was killed, Sheppard's girlfriend called the police because he had threatened her while he was drunk and belligerent.

There are some people who are upset because tthey think Bryant got an advantageous deal in not having to face trial. It strains credulity to imagine that he did not get preferential treatment because of his connections, influence, affluence and employment of strategic counsel and public relations.

But on the other hand, when one reads decisions based on the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a particular phrase comes up over and over: "the administration of justice."

Would it have been likely for Bryant to have been convicted for having killed Sheppard while trying to escape from the enraged, hysterical, intoxicated courier?  Given the evidence that has come out about Sheppard's history of similar violence, it seems that the result of a trial would have seen more than a half a million dollars of public funds spent to end with Bryant's exoneration.

Bryant has just published a memoir detailing the incident. It may be the beginning of a successful process of him trying to rehabilitate his public image. Or enough people people may have made up their minds about him to confound that hope.

Is it fair? What is unfair is that everyone in a similar situation doesn't have the access to the same resources and privileges as Michael Bryant. But that's life. However, despite the tragedy of Sheppard's death and Bryant and his family's unalterable trauma, justice appears to have been done.

An interesting interview with Bryant on CBC here


These photos of Darcy Allan Sheppard attacking a car in a similar way to the one he had attacked Bryan's were instrumental in the decision not to take his case to trial.

Nortel Show Trial Update: Prosecution witness says Chinese hackers contributed to Nortel downfall

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Computer hacking - not the bursting of the dot-com bubble or a later financial scandal - may have been the driving force behind the spectacular fall of former Canadian tech darling Nortel Networks Corp., a cyber-security expert says.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that hackers from China had breached Nortel's corporate network as far back as 2000, and maintained access to various information for at least 10 years.

That kind of hacking, said David Skillicorn of Queen's University in Ontario, may have been just as responsible, if not more, for the Nortel collapse than the dot-com bubble or the scandal that has landed three former company executives facing trial for fraud.


And in further news, yet another Crown witness does more to prove the defense's position that fraud charges are "preposterous." The Globe and Mail reports:

In earlier questioning by Crown attorney Robert Hubbard, Ms. Sledge said she felt employees were rushed to meet an October deadline to publicly disclose the company’s third-quarter financial results and the broad scope of the restatement. The restatement details were finalized in December, 2003, but Nortel announced two months later that it needed to do a second, broader restatement, which was ultimately unveiled in January, 2005.

Mr. Porter suggested the company was obliged to act quickly on the restatement in 2003 to minimize harm to investors.

“You understand it was potentially harmful to Nortel and its shareholders for quarterly statement for Q3, 2003, to be delayed and not available to the public,” he asked Ms. Sledge.

She replied that she knew it was.

Prediction: In the not-distant future, the defense moves for a summary dismissal of charges based on the prosecution not having established in any way that a crime was committed and to spare the taxpayers more wasted money and court time pursuing charges the prosecutor doesn't appear to understand...and they get a ruling in their favour.

Nortel Show Trial Update: Crown's case continues to unravel

The testimony of witness after witness in the Nortel show trial appears to demonstrate the the Crown doesn't have a case in the fraud prosecution of three senior Executives. Fraud by definition involves deceit, and the Crown has consistently been thwarted in every effort to show that Former Nortel CEO Frank Gunn, CFO Douglas Beatty and Controller Michael Gollogly were anything but forthcoming with the firm's auditors and board.

According to a report in the Financial Post, today's star Crown witness, Sue Shaw, the chief handler of financial consolidation records for the one-time telecom giant’s corporate books, testified to Crown prosecutors earlier this week that $66-million in accrued liabilities had been identified as early as mid-2002 as being no longer necessary to account for. It meant the sum should have been released into quarterly results, a common practice at Nortel at the time.

The Crown alleges the sum, alongside millions more in balance-sheet provisions, never made it to the income statement. Instead, the values were shifted to later periods, an Ontario Superior Court of Justice trial has heard.

Except, it turns out that Ms Shaw actually didn't know what she was talking about.

As The Post detailed:

David Porter, lawyer for former chief executive Frank Dunn, Wednesday entered into evidence a December, 2002 email between Nortel finance officials with an attached spreadsheet. A number of corporate reserves were listed as being dispatched to Nortel’s third-quarter 2002 income. It was presumably a document Ms. Shaw had not seen before.

“It appears that sixty-six million was released in that period,” the witness said. The direct repudiation undercut a central allegation by the Crown in its fraud case..

Oops! Seems yet again, the prosecution is made a fool of in this case. One wonders when pursuing obviously incorrect charges becomes an embarrassment and undermines the administration of justice in Ontario. The longer this trial continues without a summary judgement in favour of the defense, the more glaring that question becomes.

Gary McHale could have avoided all the trouble by renaming his group "Occupy Caledonia"

Apparently, if you stick "Occupy" in front of your name, the police let you do whatever you like.

McHale and his law-abiding group, get another form of treatment:

CAYUGA Law and order activist Gary McHale is planning another protest at the scene of a six-year-old native occupation in Caledonia after trespassing charges were dropped against the so-called Caledonia Eight for entering the property last year...

McHale, leader of Canadian Advocates for Charter Equality (CANACE), argues that the Ontario Provincial Police have practised “two-tier justice” in Caledonia during the land claims dispute by treating natives more leniently than non-natives.

Douglas Creek Estates, a former housing development, was occupied by a group from Six Nations in Feb. 2006 because they say it was being built on unsurrendered land. McHale and some of his supporters entered the site Dec. 3, 2011, but said they were not trespassing on the Ontario government-owned property because they were on a road allowance owned by Haldimand County.

“It’s completely legal,” McHale told the Dunnville Chronicle about walking on the road allowance.
“They have the opportunity to prove to the public that they honour the Charter of Rights and Freedoms for all people, but I believe the OPP will find a different tactic this time … they’ll find some trick once again to target us even though we’re doing a peaceful march down a road.”

h/t Blazing Cat Fur

Latest news from the Nortel show trial

So here's the deal: three former Nortel executives are on trial for fraud for allegedly engineering results that would give the company profits, triggering bonuses for them

But here are the problems the charges put forward by an RCMP White Collar Crimes unit that that has managed to get only one major conviction (the obviously guilty Garth Drabinsky) in the unit's history, and the theories of a prosecution that makes Inspector Clouseau look like Sherlock Holmes.

The three executives were way down the list of people who would get bonuses for the profitable periods. The three of them combined received less than ten percent of some individual former Nortel executives and Board members over the same period.

The Nortel Board and auditing firm Deloitte, which was paid about $10 million a year for auditing Nortel's books, all approved of the transactions that the executives on trial are accused of having made fraudulently. By definition, you can't do something transparently and with auditors' approval and commit fraud.

If indeed these transactions were fraudulent, then one of the unanswered mysteries of the Nortel Show Trial is the question of why the Board and Auditors who approved the transactions aren't also on facing the same fraud charges.

The answer seems obvious. The spectacular collapse of Nortel last decade had a devastating affect of the Toronto Stock Exchange and thousands of investors, many who lost fortunes while large investors like some of the Public Service Unions were able to force Nortel to pay them money at the expense of private individual investors.

The mob was screaming for blood, and so scapegoats were needed. The Board are part of the Bay Street old boy network, too well conected to go after. The sacrifice to the mob therefore came in the persons of Former CEO Frank Dunn, CFO Douglas Beatty and Controller Michael Gollogly.

In today's Ottawa Citizen, James Bagnall explains more of the illogical arguments and inconsistencies put forward by the prosecution:


The Crown has alleged this activity was directed by Nortel’s top three financial executives — Frank Dunn, Douglas Beatty and Michael Gollogly — in order to smooth out Nortel’s progression to steady, maintainable profits. Crown prosecutor Robert Hubbard added that Nortel management in January was expecting a loss in the first quarter of 2003.

He also maintains that management engineered earnings in order to trigger executive and other bonuses.

Nevertheless, to transform a fourth-quarter profit into a loss seems not only counter-intuitive, but contrary to the incentives in place for management. Indeed, the financial motivation for Nortel’s executives would have been to direct Harrison NOT to solicit new entries that created the quarterly loss.


UPDATE (Feb 1): Today The Ottawa Citizen's report discusses how the Crown's first witness actually helped make the defence's case. It also elaborates on how the Crown doesn't seem to understand the issues that it is prosecuting.

The Nortel Show Trial

The largest fraud trial in Canadian history is set to being on Monday. Nortel's collapse in 2003 cost billions to shareholders.  It had a major affect on pension funds and thousands of individual investors. Nortel's misfortune was one of the most sudden and extreme falls of an enormous corporation since the Great Depression. Billions were paid out in legal settlements and naturally everyone concerned looked around to find someone to blame.

During the dot com bubble of the early 2000's, Nortel's Board had approved billions of dolars worth of acquisitions of what turned out to be near worthless investments, and it fell to CEO Frank Dunn and CFO Douglas Beatty to try to turn that around. They instituted massive spending cuts that resulted in billions of savings and as far as financial markets were concerned, they were able to effect a miraculous resurrection at Nortel.

The Crown is alleging an extremely complex fraud on the part of Dunn, Beatty and controller Michael Gollogly to manipulate losses and earnings from one quarter to the next in order to meet the conditions for performance bonuses for the senior executives.

However there's no proof that ever happened.

Everything the trio of Dunn, Beatty and controller Michael Gollogly did was approved by the auditing firm Deloitte and fell withing the parameters of normal business practices and reporting. Just days before trial, amid the four million documents the crown has submitted as being relevant without identifying a single one that specifically shows fraud by the defendants, charges of falsifying documents were dropped. The fraud charges remain, but there is much speculation that this is simply a case of the government trying to look like it is doing something in the face of the anger and outrage from the public about a series of events which few people understand.

In today's National Post, James Bagnall provides an excellent summary of the issues:

"The deeper you dig into the accounting history of Nortel, the easier it is to believe that the board of directors, its private investigators and the RCMP just plain got it wrong - that the atmosphere may have been so poisoned by Nortel's spectacular fall from grace that many were simply looking for someone to blame."

It's an important article about a major case that details how, rather than bringing three criminals to justice, the government may be wasting millions more taxpayer dollars on an expensive show trial that will accomplish nothing other than to demonize three innocent men.

A Court Transcript worthy of P.G. Wodehouse

Best laugh I've had today, via Ghost of a Flea.