Lawlor shouldn’t have got pardons

We pay a fortune for the justice system. We expect it will keep us safe from dangerous criminals.

But what we’re actually paying for is a giant bureaucracy that places a higher value on the rights of the offender than the rights of the rest of us.

Consider Derrick Lawlor, who killed a man in Kitchener’s Victoria Park in 2014.

If you took a look at Lawlor’s history, it would have come as no surprise that he did this. He is a man easily triggered into fits of boiling rage.

Earlier, he strangled a gay man to death in Newfoundland in 1983, was jailed for manslaughter and was later pardoned.

And on Boxing Day 1997, he drove to Ottawa with a plan to kill his brother.

Lawlor later told police he planned either to burn his brother’s house down or tie him up in the woods and burn him there. He also planned to cut off his brother’s penis.

He didn’t carry out his horrible plan, but was convicted of weapons and threats charges involved in that episode. He went to jail and got another pardon.

He also told Peel Regional Police about plans to kill other men. They were not carried out and he was not charged.

Asked by police what made him so angry, he said: “Sometimes I watch movies. Movies trigger me big time. I go to a movie theatre, I walk out of there angry as hell. There’s a whole bunch of triggers for me. I really can’t say if there is any one particular thing that does it.”

How is it that, despite this history of extreme violence, Lawlor got pardoned twice, for each of the crimes of which he was convicted?

The Parole Board is quite lenient, as it turns out.

In 2015-16, it granted 82 per cent of requests to pardon people for crimes they committed. It turned down only 18 per cent of the 1,977 requests that year.

Getting a pardon means the crime you’ve committed is wiped from your record. Potential employers checking your background won’t know what you’ve done.

Even if you killed someone, all you have to do to get that pardon is serve your time, and not be convicted of any other crimes for 10 years. You don’t have to prove that you have

made a real turnaround.

I wonder if the people at Community Living in Mississauga, a charity helping people with intellectual disabilities, would have hired Lawlor if they had known his history. He worked there in 1997 when he spoke to Peel police.

And I wonder if the University of Waterloo would have hired Lawlor to work as an adviser to disabled students if they had known his history.

Would the parents of those students have been pleased with that decision? I don’t think so.

Lawlor’s contract with the university ended just days before he murdered 50-year-old Mark McCreadie in the woods beside Kitchener’s Victoria Park.

While Lawlor was still working there, his violent thoughts got so out of control that he went to Grand River Hospital, and told a social worker and doctor he had thoughts of harming promiscuous gay men. He also said he had a knife.

But he was released because he didn’t have a plan to kill a specific person.

It is shameful that these overly lax systems entitled Lawlor to freedom he didn’t deserve, couldn’t handle, and ended in another man’s life snuffed out.