RSS FeedAccess to justice or abuse of legal aid?
Killer cop seeks funds for appeal
Peter Edwards writes:
A Toronto police officer who ran up a $1.2-million legal aid bill while on trial for his mistress’s murder is now seeking taxpayer funding to appeal his conviction.
Mental illness and crime
Father suffocated sons, stabbed daughter, murder trial told
Another case where mental illness is at issue. Perhaps, if we as a society spent more money on diagnosis, treatment and care of the mentally ill, we would have fewer crimes like this.
Terri Theodore writes:
More video showed a blood-splattered home leading from the living room into a bedroom where two messages were written in what appears to have been blood on a white pillow case. On one side the note reads “gone to Neverland” and the opposite site reads “forever young.”
Into the minds of the condemned: statements from Death Row
What’s it like to live on Death Row? What’s it like to die there?
I wonder how a person can stand to wait in a small cell, watching the second hand of a clock tick down to their execution? After an average 10 year wait, the person is finally led down a hallway, strapped to a gurney, and injected with a lethal cocktail of drugs.
Since 1982, when Texas began utilizing lethal injections to kill people, 441 people have been executed by the State. Moments before the execution, the warden asked each of these inmates whether they had any last words. All of their last statements have been recorded.
A friend of mine sent me a link to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Death Row page, which contains every last statement given since 1982.
I have to admit that I sat for an hour and read over a hundred of these last statements. There was something incredibly powerful and compelling about the final words that a person speaks when they know they are about to die. I had a hard time pulling myself away from them.
It doesn’t matter whether you are for or against capital punishment. If we move beyond the cold statistics of the offender’s height, race, and education level, their last statements poignantly remind us that these convicts are human beings that bleed and feel pain like you and I.
Many of the statements express remorse. Others are shocking. Some are even funny. But the common thread that ties all of the statements together is the foreboding sense of inevitability, resignation, and acceptance of a pre-determined fate. I have reproduced some of the statements below (in their entirety):
Crown liability for negligent release from jail
Father seeks compensation for son killed by pedophile
Bastien was out on an extended pass from a detention centre where he was serving time for several unrelated offences.
Three weeks after the slaying, then-public security minister Serge Ménard said Bastien shouldn’t have been let out.
Hypnosis evidence and murder
Man admits committing 1992 murder
A former Canada Post supervisor admitted today to the 1992 killing of his girlfriend, two years after the Supreme Court of Canada threw out his conviction in a landmark decision because key evidence was obtained through hypnosis.
Update on Tori Stafford case
Accused in Tori Stafford murder in court
Her lawyer, Jeanine Leroy, says there is a “substantial amount of evidence” to review before the case goes any further.
Too harsh or too soft?
Life for teen in Rengel murder
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