Not sure what topic this should fall under, but this is IMO an extremely good editorial regarding the need for victim's rights to be entrenched in the law.
It is from: http://canoe.ca/Columnists/harris.html
July 11, 2003
Justice for victims
By MICHAEL HARRIS -- For The Ottawa Sun
It is fashionable these days for special interest groups to push their causes, so allow me to push mine -- victims' rights.
Although it has not been the stuff of front-page news, the Canadian justice system is reluctantly zigzagging toward a reckoning on the issue of how we treat citizens who have been victims of crime.
Back in 1996, political giant-killer Andy Mitchell introduced a private member's bill that would have seen victims' rights recognized in the preamble to the Criminal Code. Bill C-303 ended up in the dustbins of history.
As you read these words, federal and provincial justice officials are working on a new Canadian Statement of Basic Principles for Victims of Crime. Not only should this document be completed expeditiously, it should form the basis for a constitutional amendment that would finally give victims of crime their rightful place in a justice system that has so studiously ignored them except for the usual orgy of tokenism that passes for public policy in this emotional area.
Consider the case of Carrie Lauzon. The 16-year-old girl was murdered by another 16-year-old in Cornwall in 1994. It took seven years before the boy was convicted of the murder. In the meantime, seven Christmases and seven birthdays passed in unresolved agony for her parents waiting for the justice system to stand up for their daughter.
Interestingly, it could soon be impossible for cases like Carrie's to happen in the United States. There has been a 20-year effort in the U.S. to amend the American Constitution in such a way that victims' rights would be included in the 6th Amendment, so that, among other things, victims would have a right to the speedy resolution of the cases involving them.
The federal Victims' Rights Amendment Act in the U.S. is sponsored by senators Jon Kyl and Dianne Feinstein and co-sponsored by 23 other senators of both parties. The legislative effort has the support of President George W. Bush, just as it was championed by former president Bill Clinton. The matter now goes before the Senate's full judiciary committee which is expected to endorse the amendment within a month.
It has been a long road to justice for victims of crime in the U.S.. In its final report to then-president Ronald Reagan in 1982, the task force on victims of crime proposed a constitutional amendment. Their reasoning ought to have a resonance for legislators in this country:
"In applying and interpreting the vital guarantees that protect all citizens, the criminal justice system has lost an essential balance. It should be clearly understood that this task force wished in no way to vitiate the safeguards that shelter anyone accused of crime; but it must be urged with equal vigour that the system has deprived the innocent, the honest, and the helpless of its protection.
"The guiding principle that provides the focus for constitutional liberties is that government must be restrained from trampling the rights of the individual citizen.
"The victims of crime have been transformed into a group oppressively burdened by a system designed to protect them. This oppression must be addressed."
The imbalance and oppression cited by the president's task force nicely captures the shameful treatment that the justice system metes out to victims of crime in this country. Occasionally, the abuse has been so severe, victims of crime ended up suing the system that was supposed to be protecting them.
Two cases come to mind. In 1996, 14-year-old Jasmine Vanscoy was fatally shot in the head by a young offender while at a party. Without informing the victim's family, the Crown accepted a plea of manslaughter down from second-degree murder. The sentence was two years. No one can argue that plea-bargaining has no place in the system. But neither can anyone seriously suggest that the process that often benefits the perpetrator should be closed to the victims of crime.
In the same year, 1996, Linda Evans was attacked by her former spouse. He stabbed her repeatedly with a pair of scissors, permanently crippling one of her hands. Ms. Evans was stunned at the preliminary hearing to find out that the man who had stabbed her in the head, limbs, and torso had worked out a deal with the Crown that saw him plead guilty to aggravated assault instead of standing trial on a charge of attempted murder.
No one had bothered to inform the victim, largely because in our system the victim is deemed to have no rights, as both Karen Vanscoy, Jasmine's mother, and Linda Evans found out.
Both women sued the Ontario government, claiming a violation of their rights under Ontario's Victims' Bill of Rights. (They also argued that their rights had been violated under Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.) The presiding judge dismissed their arguments, ruling that the Ontario bill was nothing more than government policy wrapped up in the language of legislation.
The court ruled that government never intended to offer victims any rights for the simple reason that it failed to provide any remedy to victims in the legislation. It was merely a "feel good" measure. In an act of woeful judicial myopia, the judge further ruled that a victim's right to be informed about the disposition of the case before the courts was not vital or fundamental to our societal notion of justice.
That is not how the attorney-general of Manitoba feels about it. In that province, victims of the most serious crimes are granted access to information about the legal process they find themselves in.
If a victim feels that his/her rights have been violated, they have recourse to a formal complaints mechanism that is not the legal equivalent of a root canal or a trip to the proctologist. Perhaps that is why Gord Mackintosh is the only provincial AG so far to publicly endorse the notion of enshrining victims' rights in the Charter of Rights.
Good on him. After all, if the Charter is there to give inmates the right to vote, it ought to be there for people who are trying to figure out how a daughter's lost life can be worth two years of lost liberty for her killer.
Author, broadcaster and investigative journalist Michael Harris can be heard Monday to Thursday, 1-3 p.m. on 580 CFRA.
Letters to the editor should be sent to [email protected].