Law v. Justice: Confusion is common
“I believe in America,” he began.
It made his fortune, let him to have a family, including a daughter.
Bonasera didn’t protest when she found a boyfriend, not an Italian. Then one day the boyfriend and a buddy attacked her.
“When I went to the hospital, her nose was a’broken. Her jaw was a’shattered, held together by wire.”
Bonasera went to the police. “The judge sentenced them to three years in prison – suspended sentence,” he said. “They went free that very day!”
He turned to his wife. “For justice, we must go to Don Corleone.”
It is the opening scene of The Godfather, and the opening scene of my law course, part of our journalism program. The grieving Bonasera knows what he wants, but fears saying it out loud, so he whispers it in the mafia don’s ear. Vito Corleone shakes his head.
“You ask me to do murder, for money.”
“I ask you for justice,” Bonasera replies. “That is not justice; your daughter is still alive.”
“Then they can suffer then, as she suffers.”
There’s the problem. Justice is a slippery term, with as many definitions as there are people eager to define it. At one time stealing a man’s horse was a hanging offence. That was justice. Fortunately, that is not the law today.
The law and justice, I tell my students, are distant cousins who rarely speak, to paraphrase actor Marlon Brando from another movie.
The law is a dispute-solving mechanism intended to keep us from settling disagreements with guns and knives. It is a human enterprise, with all the usual shortcomings. And often the public stares in disbelief, even anger, when the law seems to veer from justice.
I was reminded of that recently when an email arrived after news broke of an alleged murder on P.E.I.
“The media are saying the homicide yesterday was the first one since 2015, but Shannon Dawn Rayner is accused of killing the second infant in 2016. Seems as though they’ve forgotten that… or maybe babies don’t count?”
Babies do count. Just not the way you might think.
The email to me turned into one to this paper about why the reporter skipped that case.
“He checked with the courts before the story was published. Infanticide is not considered murder, the courts tell us, and they warned us not to classify it as such,” came the reply. In fact, the reporter checked twice.
It’s not a new question. CTV reporter Andrew Weichel explored the issue in 2010 following a case in Vancouver. The infanticide law dates to 1948 and was an attempt to get around jury refusals to convict mothers of murder. The maximum sentence is five years, but no conviction in Canada has resulted in a jail term longer than one year. There is no minimum sentence, Weichel noted.
The victim must have been less than a year old and the mother must have suffered a mental illness caused by childbirth.
“It is an attempt to recognize the fact that in the post-partum period there’s a great deal of disturbance in the chemistry of the mother that’s given birth,” criminology professor Robert Gordon said. “Her mind may be disturbed.”
So infanticide is a form of special treatment? That’s not for me to say. But it is the law.