The conundrum about punishment for the worst killers
No one knows why Derek Saretzky, 24, strangled cheerful little Hailey Dunbar-Blanchette, drank her blood, and ate part of her heart. He had killed Hanne Meketech, 69, five days before, went to the home of Terry Blanchette, slit his throat, and took his 2-year-old daughter away with him to a campsite where he eventually burned her body.
In his kill list, the Lethbridge killer had referred to Hailey as “the hideous baby.” The 2015 killings were separate and planned. Saretzky’s motive remains unknown.
What is to be done with men like Saretzky? Before the Conservative government changed the law in 2011, he would have been sentenced concurrently for the killings, possibly serving 25 years and being released. But he was sentenced consecutively, 25 years for each murder, and will probably die in jail.
So was Douglas Garland of Airdrie, Alta., who in 2014 tortured and killed Alvin and Kathy Liknes and their beautiful 5-year-old grandson, Nathan. So was Justin Bourque, the Moncton man who slaughtered three RCMP officers and wounded two others in 2014.
Concurrent sentences had always seemed like a Get Out of Jail Free card for killers. I’ve killed one, the second is free, and the toddler is just for fun. I don’t know if killers consider the consequences of killing methodically, but perhaps they will now. Why didn’t Saretzky spare Hailey? Two-year-olds are not great witnesses. But he wanted to eat her small heart.
Saretsky’s lawyer is appealing the conviction and the sentence, basically on all grounds, which seems dubious, but he calls the 75-year sentence “cruel and unusual.” A lawyer in a Quebec triple-murder case also hopes to challenge the law in the Supreme Court of Canada.
There are three camps on criminal sentencing: one says jail should rehabilitate; another says it should punish; and a third says it should do both.
Canadians agree that capital punishment is intolerable. All we have left is imprisonment. Were Saretzky, Garland and the six other Canadian men facing similarly long sentences over-punished?
At some point the Supreme Court of Canada may have to deal with this. Remember, hard cases (think of Hailey and Nathan) will make bad law.
For catastrophic over-punishment, we naturally turn to the U.S. where, as the Star’s Daniel Dale reports, a Black man was sentenced to “six life sentences plus 118 years for a no-injury holdup at age 15 in which he stole $65, two phones and three joints.” The Democratic governor of Virginia has just partially pardoned him. He will stay in jail another two years.
In the U.S., they call it “charge stacking.” As an Ohio study from the Center for Prison Reform explains it, prosecutors try to interpret one crime as several. For example, a California man was charged with 170 counts of misdemeanour because 170 of his goats wandered into a neighbour’s property. He got 60 years.
This is different from the infamous three strikes and you’re out. It’s the splitting of one crime into three, which means three separate punishments, no matter how simultaneous and minor those crimes might have been. The American legal system is punitive to a distorting extent; it’s like placing the convicted before a funhouse sentencing mirror.
The patchwork of law across the U.S. is chaotic but overwhelmingly punitive. Rehabilitation is not the primary goal. It sometimes seems that American prisons are designed to appall, so that released prisoners will follow the law out of sheer terror. Good luck with that.
But rehabilitation is an absurd question in the cases of these men. Jailing Saretzky and Garland for life is simply a statement that Canada values little children and cannot risk their lives. Justice William Tilleman said he hoped one day Saretzky would gain some insight and an understanding of the value of human life. “A sentence of jail is not a sentence of vengeance.”
In these cases, it becomes apparent neither punishment nor attempts at rehabilitation achieve anything for us, the victims or the killer. The deeds were done, the children remain lifeless and dishonoured, and a regretful killer will still not welcome 75 years of thinking sorrowfully about the child. He does not care. We are frozen.