Shawn Rehn wasn’t treated lightly by Canada’s criminal justice system
I hate to rain on a good soft-on-crime panic in the making, and RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson was awfully impressive in his news conference in Edmonton on Sunday night, sort of a Julian Fantino with more gravitas — oh, all right, with some gravitas.
But whatever else the story of Shawn Rehn illustrates, it ain’t the failure of the criminal justice system.
Rather, its chief lesson appears to be — this will sound like heresy in the circumstances of this tragedy — that jail doesn’t work.
Rehn is the 34-year-old who shot and wounded two RCMP officers, one gravely, last Saturday morning.
The two were investigating a stolen car they found in a parking lot outside a casino in nearby St. Albert, Alta. They were trying to arrest Rehn when he pulled away and abruptly shot them both at close range.
Const. David Wynn, a married father of three, was shot in the head. He remains in hospital, but the RCMP have said he hasn’t regained consciousness and isn’t expected to survive.
The other officer, unarmed auxiliary Const. Derek Bond, has been released from hospital after being treated for a gunshot wound to the arm and torso.
Paulson questioned whether the justice system had dropped the ball at his news conference, saying that Rehn “represents a significant accumulation of criminality and behaviours that I think will require the RCMP and other stakeholders in the criminal justice system to examine very closely how it is this person was walking among us.
“There will be an in-depth analysis of how it is that this individual came to be free.”
He also described Rehn’s “complex criminal history” and the “labyrinth” of charges against him and at one point said, “I’ve been in policing for 30 years and I’ve not seen the likes of what I’ve seen here.”
The inference was clear: This Rehn character was a bad, bad man and if he’d been behind bars, where he ought to have been, this disaster wouldn’t have happened.
Having dropped this little bombshell, and with Rehn’s privacy rights as dead as he is (he was tracked later to an unoccupied house and found dead by his own hand), the commissioner and the force then, at least in public, washed its hands of the whole business.
An RCMP media spokesman Monday told me he wasn’t able to release Rehn’s full criminal record because of confidentiality concerns. Paulson was apparently en route back to Ottawa and unavailable.
Fortunately, some enterprising reporters in Edmonton (among them, one Joshua Skurnik, who passed it onto David Akin of Sun Media, who posted it on Twitter) went to the courthouse and came up with what appears to be Rehn’s complete criminal record. By my count, it has 59 convictions and 38 outstanding charges.
And contrary to the suggestion that Rehn was treated lightly by the system and given kiss after kiss, he did time — 60 days — the very first occasion he was convicted as an adult, for breaking and entering and theft. Then 19, he was also put on probation for a year and ordered to pay $921 in restitution. On the next significant occasion, convicted for dangerous operation of a car, he got six months in jail and three years’ probation.
The time after that, convicted for possession of stolen property, housebreaking and theft, obstructing police and breaching conditions, he was sentenced to at least five months in jail. (Some of his sentences may have been concurrent; it’s not clear.)
On his next serious raft of offences — assault with a weapon and careless use or storage of a firearm — Rehn spent seven months in pretrial custody; this was when he got his 10-year firearms ban.
It’s clear that court orders meant squat to him: He regularly breached the conditions of his probation and various recognizances.
But in 2010, when he was convicted of breaching his 2001 firearms ban for the first time as well as a whack of other offences, he was sentenced to a total of five years in prison.
With credit for pretrial custody, that left three years.
His last conviction was for assault — it appears it may have been while he was still in jail and got him an extra day tacked onto his sentence.
Of the outstanding charges Rehn was facing at the time of his death, 13 were for breaches of earlier court orders.
I don’t offer a defence of the man, who was pretty obviously a habitual offender, a serious thief (fully 33 of his convictions were for theft, B&E, or possession of stolen property or stolen credit cards) and a hazard on the roads (he had four driving while disqualified-type of convictions and incurred at least one driving prohibition).
And he regularly gave the finger to the courts and their orders.
But it was hardly the case — at least from what I know, absent the RCMP’s formal release of convictions not available from the courts — that this was a man who was forever being cut a break by soft-hearted prosecutors and soft-headed judges.
Nor does it appear that he was always such a violent, unpredictable character that he should have been declared either a dangerous or longterm offender years ago.
(Both require showing a pattern of repetitive and aggressive behaviour, usually but not exclusively involving sexual or predatory violence.)
In total, in fact, Rehn received sentences that added up to about 10 years, in addition to the several times he spent significant stretches in pretrial custody.
Short of preventive detention for all such rounders — and their numbers are, I’m afraid, legion; they really do walk among us, to borrow the commissioner’s phrase — I’m at a loss as to how Rehn could have been lawfully held in custody, let alone how the justice system screwed this up.