Abuse of Justice in British Columbia

Aboriginal discounts on pounds of white flesh

By Anthony Oluwatoyin

Monday, April 16, 2007

Not in 400-plus years has there been a more muscular violation in the meat-market of justice.

In Shakespeare's 16th Century play, The Merchant of Venice, the good merchant Antonio stands to lose a pound of his flesh when he defaults on a loan from Shylock, a money-lender. A deal is a deal. After all, Shylock did not hold a musket to Antonio's head to get a signature. Portia, a lady in love, makes a lovely plea for mercy in a famous speech ("The quality of mercy is not strained"). When that fails, she resorts to reason, poking a deep hole in the contract. Shylock, it turns out, may have his pound of flesh, but he must not shed one drop of blood in the process.

The deal is undone. But what we learn is what it takes to trump justice. Sure, sometimes things do not go as planned. But by the same token you better have some weighty reason if you renege.

Except in Beautiful B.C. where we have just suffered one gorgeous abuse of justice. The killer-punk who dragged the body of a gas station attendant in a gas-and-dash hit-and-run two years ago has just had his sentence reduced by our Court of Appeal.

Twenty-four-year-old Grant De Patie, the attendant, was ripped to bits, flayed across a lifeless trail of some four, five miles, pinned to the undercarriage of a Chrysler LeBaron, stolen and driven by Darnell K. Pratt, 16 at the time, a born predator.

The boy got away with about $12 worth of unpaid gas and all the dreams a 24 year-old could flesh out across a lifetime. The subsequent community outrage has now finally been drowned out by an Appeals Court only more remorseless than the killer-boy himself.

This is the same court, remember, that upheld the infamous ruling just a few years ago that punished the road-race killers of Irene Thorpe with mere house arrest. Justice L.S.G. Finch in that ruling said flat-out that he did "not think the experience of the respondents has been that this is a lenient sentence." Say what?! He actually believed those road-kill pervs that being sentenced to stay in your own home for killing is too much to take? Well, why not just drop the whole farce and let each criminal set his own sentence? What a perversion of the old wisdom of our legal heritage that says simply: "no man shall be judge in his own cause."

Oh, fibber Finch wasn't done. He lamented the fact that the killer-racers would "face the stigma of being convicted criminals serving a sentence in their community." And what "community" would that be exactly? The killers, Bhalru and Khosa, are Indo-Canadian. But really what these creatures belong to is a subculture of gang-infested, pathological crackhead wannabees who would view mowing down a white woman and getting away with it as a badge of honour. Whos's kidding whom here?

Now three fresh new Bozos (Justices Mary Saunders, Kenneth Smith and Pamela Kirkpatrick) on the same Court have decided – unanimously, just as in the Irene Thorpe road-race case – that nine years is "a very heavy sentence" – even for killing. Well, the judges are consistent. I mean, if house arrest is tough, nine years is eternal damnation.

So the judges cut two years off. Justice Saunders actually called it a "discount" on adult justice. You can't get more brazen than that. A "discount." Like a fishmonger bargain. How foul, fiendish and deep-fried in sumptuous stupidity.

Our Justices, you could say, gave themselves a discount from common sense.

Saunders said that Pratt was "not adult in the eyes of the law." But he was raised to adult court because of the savage nature of the crime. He was sentenced as an adult when he pled guilty to manslaughter. So what gives?

The Justices did not say that the sentencing judge erred in this. They didn't dare. We the people had made the decision through our elected representatives to allow for that kind of sentencing. So what place does some unelected judge have overturning the informed will of the people?

Saunders had to back-pedal. She said the Court was in fact deferring to Parliament's directives regarding aboriginal youth sentencing. What else could she say? That they were thumbing their noses at Parliament? She didn't have the guts.

And what if the victim were aboriginal? Would the victim then cancel out the predator? What if the killer were white but the victim aboriginal? Saunders and Co. needed to show that they were not saying that only aboriginal criminals count. They didn't dare say that being white counts for nothing.

That's where the mother of all sob stories comes in. Pratt was raised by a single mother (of course) who was a meth-nut (of course) who neglected him so badly that he had been a ward of Social Services for years (of course). He was a high-school drop-out and post-graduate thief (of course). He was a daily drunk who was high on 20 beers, no less, on the deadly day.

So the Justices recommended that Pratt be "considered a good candidate for rehabilitation and reintegration into the community." (Of course.)

Still, the Justices found that Pratt had been given too much credit for the time he had spent in custody awaiting sentencing. So they decided to cut even more time from his sentence in order to show that too much time had already been cut in his favour.

That's the what-ya-ma-call the new and improved New Math.

Some discount, eh?

Our Justices could have simply said Pratt got too much of a discount for pre-trial lock-up but not enough for youth and ancestry. Rectifying one and restoring the other (two years added here, but taken off there) would then balance out to the sentence already given. Nine years. Arbitrators under law do this all the time as professionally required. But then our Justices would stand accused of fairness across the board. How vulgar that would be, eh?

I say it now, race is not a discount from justice precisely because justice is not that kind of deal. Just consider all the breaks our killer-boy actually got from the justice system. He was pissed-drunk, he was 16. Was he charged with under-age drinking? He was drunk, he was driving. Was he charged with DUI/DWI? He had no driver's licence, he was driving. Was he charged with driving without a licence? He was driving a car he stole. Was he charged with carjacking? Theft? Anything?

And the cruelest irony of all. Was the boy even charged with regard to the $12 worth of gas De Patie died trying to get the boy to pay for? Pratt was originally charged with 2nd degree murder – for all of 15 minutes, I believe. Next thing, they pled him out at manslaughter. The fix was in. In America, he would have faced multiple counts to cover these details (drinking; theft; killing) across the board. That way a plea would still mean a lot of years. It certainly wouldn't result in this unearned and unconscionable leniency.

Instead. Look what we got here. The Justices themselves couldn't resist a back-hand swipe at the bargain. They said there must have been "insufficient evidence," that the little monster knew that DePatie was scraping along the highway, as Pratt sped off, though, in fact, the sentencing judge found that Pratt had bragged to his friends the day after the killing that he heard DePatie's screams coming from under the car.

Four hundred-plus years ago, Shylock couldn't get away with one drop of blood. Now a uniquely useless boy has a man scraped bloodless like an Apache scalper. Then we reward him with a barber's discounts.

Oh, by the way, the Justices referred to the car as "his car." Pratt's car. The car he stole. (Oops!) How we give ourselves away.

That's what happens when you get so carried away with one-sided justice. If you can call it justice.

De Patie's mom put it so well. "Justice is best served cold," she said.

Instead, it is Grant De Patie who is cold six-feet under. He does not rest.

How can we?