No doubt McClintic belongs in prison
Child killer moved to lodge
Criminal justice plays a tricky role in Canada’s political culture war. In opposition, liberal parties sometimes try to play off conservatives’ authoritarian instincts to make themselves look enlightened — Justin Trudeau’s Liberals deplored mandatory minimum sentences, for example — only to find themselves reluctant to change course much once in government. Voters like locking up baddies, and everyone knows it.
The transfer of TerriLynne McClintic from the high-security Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ont., to the Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge for Aboriginal Women in Maple Creek, Sask., is the sort of thing where Conservatives hold all the cards. In an exchange in the Ontario legislature Tuesday between three Tory MPPs, each declared himself shocked, outraged, saddened, and shocked again. Public Safety Minister Michael Tibollo promised to take it up with the feds. And indeed, I’m a bit surprised the federal Conservatives didn’t raise it in their own question period.
This is a disgrace that should bother tough-oncrime types and bleeding hearts alike.
A horrifying refresher — fair warning — for those who need it: April 8, 2009, was the first day eight-year-old Tori Stafford was allowed to walk home by herself from Oliver Stephens School in Woodstock, Ont. She never made it. McClintic, then 18, struck up a conversation as school let out, then lured her into her 28-year-old boyfriend Michael Rafferty’s car with the promise of seeing a puppy.
There was no puppy, needless to say. McClintic tried to keep Tori calm while the couple bought drugs, then garbage bags and a claw hammer. “I said I’d make sure she got home, that I wouldn’t let anything happen to her,” McClintic said at Rafferty’s trial in 2012.
Instead she stood by in a field while Rafferty raped Tori, guarding her during a break in the horror while she relieved herself — McClintic told the court she saw “blood in the snow.” Then she beat, kicked and claw-hammered Tori to death. Tori’s body wasn’t found for more than two months.
McClintic pleaded guilty to first degree murder in 2010, making her ineligible for parole for 25 years. Rafferty was found guilty two years later and sentenced to the same.
In the eight years since, McClintic has earned no rewards for good behaviour. In 2012 she pleaded guilty to assaulting fellow inmate Aimee McIntyre, with whom she had requested to work in a peer-support program.
“Trying to get some shots through her arms, finally I brought my foot up tried stompin’ on her face a couple times,” McClintic wrote to a friend, describing the assault. (She affixed a smiley face to the aforementioned sentence.) “Point made, statement just not as loud as I would have liked it to be.” McClintic lamented she could have done more damage to McIntyre in a larger room.
“The focal point (of Okimaw Ohci) is the spiritual lodge where teachings, ceremonies and workshops with elders take place,” the Correctional Service Canada website reads. “The women learn how to live independently by cooking, doing laundry, cleaning and doing outdoor maintenance chores.”
One hopes the joint is prepared.
Regardless, the decision doesn’t just offend on grounds of insufficient punishment or threat to public safety — though I’m plenty offended on both grounds and I consider myself something of a bleeding heart. (We’re not even entitled to an explanation. Correctional Service Canada won’t disclose McClintic’s location, the London Free Press reported; the news came instead from Tori’s “enraged” father.)
It also offends on grounds of unequal treatment. It is a long-established principle of the criminal justice system that “particular attention” be given to “the circumstances of Aboriginal offenders” in considering sentencing alternatives to imprisonment. The court heard of McClintic’s truly lousy childhood: abandoned by her mother, using opioids by age eight, no secondary education at all. And certainly, more Indigenous children suffer in such circumstances than nonIndigenous. But the effects on children’s lives and future prospects are the same. We should either take them into account or we shouldn’t.
I don’t enjoy trying to empathize with murderers. I’m mostly a bleeding heart because our prisons seem far better at doling out raw punishment than they do at accomplishing the far more useful goals of deterrence and rehabilitation. That said, there are some people who unambiguously need to be locked up very secure circumstances for all three of those reasons, no matter what their future prospects.
McClintic is so obviously one of those people that it seems ridiculous even to say it. Tori Stafford’s family and supporters are planning a protest on Parliament Hill on Nov. 2. If I were Liberal public safety minister Ralph Goodale, I’d be hiding under my desk.