Justice at a snail’s pace

Akey pledge in Magna Carta is “To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.” The assurance is so old it was written in Latin, and we pride ourselves on having modernized the law along with the language over the centuries. But beware of modernizing it out of existence while calling it progress. It’s the sort of thing that inspires anger at the system.

I bring this up partly because of the case of an Ontario man charged with firstdegree murder, who just got turned loose by a judge after spending four years in custody waiting for the justice system to get around to him. It’s outrageous.

Both parts, I mean. If guilty, he literally got away with murder. If innocent, he spent four years in jail for nothing. Most of us would heartily endorse the maxim attributed to Victorian statesman William Gladstone that “justice delayed is justice denied.” It’s why the mighty medieval writ of habeas corpus required that authorities, if they hauled you off, made good on their complaint and pronto. But there’s a guy in Canada, now 83, still awaiting sentencing over Adscam.

Not every trial is so slow, of course. But enough are that the Supreme Court of Canada has said provincial courts must generally get from charge to trial in 18 months, and superior courts in 30. Which is still a ruinous chunk out of your life if you’re acquitted. And while bribery is not an issue in our courts, justice is “sold” in that these extended proceedings are as hard to afford as to endure.

I recently received a Canadian Constitution Foundation appeal for funds to help with a court action over our right not to be subjected to excruciatingly long waits in the health-care system. The letter noted matter-offactly that due to much expert testimony, the trial “is scheduled for 24 weeks of courtroom time. And that’s after more than six years of pre-trial motions, disclosure of tens of thousands of pages of documents, and delays by the government.”

Six years? Well sure. The government has all the time in the world, and isn’t spending its own money. It’s why we used to have firm institutional restrictions on its ability to treat our rights with cavalier contempt. And it gets worse.

Contrast what the state doesn’t worry much about with what it does. As reported in the National Post, “The Toronto police hate crime unit is investigating posters in the city that urged white people ‘tired of political correctness’ and ‘questioning when immigration will stop’ to join an online movement.” The posters sound stupid and obnoxious. But they hardly constitute a threat to public order or anyone’s personal safety.

Meanwhile, the federal government is pressing ahead with Bill C-16, which under the guise of preventing hate crimes may very well criminalize the ability to question whether there really are about three dozen genders. Violence is already illegal, against the transgendered or anyone else, and we have a long and glorious history of not prosecuting people for their state of mind beyond requiring that the state prove they had the intent to commit a crime as well as performing the physical act. Nevertheless New York threatens six-figure fines for businesses that don’t think “genderqueer” is a compulsory compliment, and Canadian courts too languid to push through a murder charge may soon do the same.

Remember the maxim from Robert Peel, founder of the London “Bobbies” police force: “To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.”

I refer here not to the police narrowly, the men and women in blue. I mean the entire apparatus exercising the “police power” of the state to enforce law. And if you asked 1,000 people on the street whether crimes involving fraud or violence should be dealt with quickly, they would all say yes. I doubt one would say it