Let’s value every life
What is to be done with Alexandre Bissonnette? The convicted murderer shot six men and tried to kill six others in a peaceful Quebec mosque on the wintry evening of Jan. 29, 2017.
A paramedic, Adréanne Leblanc, who had worked that night killed herself this March. Her family said the slaughter had been a major factor in her death.
Bissonnette leaves behind staggering pain. Seventeen children lost fathers, six women lost husbands, and the injured will live with their damaged bodies. Friends and neighbours suffered extraordinary trauma, as did hospital staff, Quebeckers and Canada itself.
Bissonnette’s sentencing hearing continues. The judge will impose a sentence in September. It used to be that all murders would be lumped together for a concurrent sentence of 25 years. The judge has hinted that he may be sentencing him consecutively for each murder. That means 25 years x 6 = 150 years.
Concurrent sentencing might be considered humane, were it not for the unhelpful fact that it gives a killer the freedom to kill as many people as he can. He’ll get 25 years for sure. Any corpse after that is free. As the Montreal Gazette reported, Bissonnette, a violent extremist, planned for years, anticipating glory. He made 82 internet searches of the mosque, choosing a time when it would be filled with helpless people he assumed were hateful Muslims and immigrants. He hated feminists but found no women to shoot.
When he arrived, he tried to kill two men but his rifle jammed. He could have left. Instead he smiled at them as if it were a prank, and shot them at close range with a handgun, repeatedly.
There were four children in the mosque including a young girl, and another chance to be brought to his senses. No.
He selected weapons to do maximum damage, a semi-automatic handgun and a semi-automatic rifle, carrying 108 rounds. He planned to shoot dozens of people.
Just before the attack, he was still studying self-defence tactics, some of which he used, to keep killing for as long as possible.
As the Gazette’s Andy Riga reported, Bissonnette’s lawyer mentioned 17 cases where consecutive sentences could have been handed down. In at least two cases, they were, but for extreme serial killings that included such things as cannibalism.
One was Douglas Garland, a lifetime criminal who killed Nathan O’Brien, 5, and his grandparents, and not simultaneously. It’s not clear how long Nathan lived. The bodies were allegedly burned.
Or he may mean Derek Saretzky, who killed a friendly retired woman, and five days later a young man. Saretzky found the man’s two-year-old daughter Hailey upstairs. He strangled her, cut her body into pieces, drank her blood, ate part of her heart, and says he burned her remains in a campfire.
Both these men got consecutive sentences totalling 75 years— 25 years for each murder— and both are appealing. Is the 2011 law allowing consecutive sentences overreaching?
Not if the murders themselves were consecutive. One function of sentencing is to deter, not just future criminals, but the killer who moves from victim to victim, each time saying “Shall I?” There was no reason to kill Hailey, too young to talk well. At each consecutive indignity to her body, he could have paused. He did not.
Concurrent sentences are the ultimate gesture of contempt for victims. They’re lumped together, dead, faceless and forgotten. They cry out from their graves for justice. Who will speak for them? Consecutive sentences value each victim individually. Col. Russell Williams murdered, tortured, raped, surveilled and broke into dozens of Ontario homes where he posed in little girls’ panties and did many foul things. He filmed it all.
He was sentenced consecutively for the murders of Cpl. Marie-France Comeau and Jessica Lloyd. The Comeau family from Quebec could not show up in full force but the wonderful Lloyd family was there. I worried Comeau would be forgotten. The consecutive sentence made sure she was not.
Consecutive sentences value every human life, may slow down serial killers, and may well give the man with the bloody knife and the smoking gun something to think about: Will I die in prison or not?