Common sense is needed in our justice system

After reading about the disturbing case of serial-killer Michael McGray, who wound up killing a cellmate in 2010 in Mountain Institution in Agassiz, I’m leaning toward capital punishment for multiple murderers.

I mean, why do taxpayers need to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to keep evil scum like this 47-year-old, convicted of killing seven people, in motel-style comfort in our bleeding-heart prison system?

The same goes for the likes of serial-killer Clifford Olson, who confessed to murdering 11 young people and finally met his maker last year after putting his victims’ families through mental torture.

I say I’m only leaning toward capital punishment, because I don’t really like the idea of the state taking a life. And the fact is, that given half the chance, government screws up everything.

Which is why McGray, a homicidal Nova Scotia-born drifter, found himself double-bunked in a B.C. medium-security prison with 33-year-old Jeremy Phillips, and strangled him.

Indeed, it must have been mindblowing at Phillips’ inquest to hear assistant Mountain prison warden Brenda Lamm explain how McGray, who’d just been transferred from Kent maximum-security jail, was “committed to his correctional plan,” was “performing very well” — and she didn’t believe he’d “manipulated the staff.”

Let’s get real here: Serial killers like Olson and McGray are master manipulators. Pretending otherwise is dangerously naive.

Besides, as University of the Fraser Valley criminologist John Martin says: “If someone who is a six-time serial killer doesn’t warrant maximum security, I mean, does anybody deserve to be in maximum security?”

Martin, though, doesn’t think Ottawa can reopen the issue of capital punishment. Indeed, reached by phone in Mexico, he wouldn’t say whether he himself believes in it : “I struggle with that question. I couldn’t give a definitive response.”

Martin does, however, deny being a political opportunist in switching from the B.C. Tories to the B.C. Liberals following his crushing defeat in April as Tory candidate in the Chilliwack-Hope byelection, when he came in third behind the NDP and Liberal candidates.

“If I was an opportunist, I would have put on a red Che Guevara T-shirt and joined the Dippers [NDPers],” he says, adding it’s really a two-party system in B.C. and any other party entering the field is nothing but a spoiler.

As for the B.C. Tory party, he charged it had “absolutely no internal discipline,” and the byelection defeat showed the wind had gone out of its sails.

One of the embarrassing things for Martin, of course, is when folks revisit old quotes he made slamming the Liberals, for whom he is now a candidate. In a Georgia Straight opinion piece immediately before the byelection, for example, he accused the Christy Clark government of creating a “catch and release” justice system and said a vote for the B.C. Tories was a vote to restore funding to the system.

I think the McGray case clearly shows that what we need, above all, is a justice system with some common sense.