Life Sentence: Stories from four decades of court reporting — or, how I fell out of love with the Canadian Justice system. (Especially Judges). by Christie Blatchford
Christie Blatchford is fired up about the state of the Canadian Justice system, and she wants you to be as well. The trouble is that I already have a pretty full plate right now, wondering what is going to kill us all first: a world war that Donald Trump starts so as to us distract from his criminal activities or global warming (it’s anthropological GLOBAL WARMING, people, it’s not “climate change”.) Unfortunately for Christie’s cause, I just don’t think we are all going to die from a bad case of Justice System corruption.
Apart from being personally off-board about the target of her outrage, I did find that the book offered some interesting, and in some cases horrifying, details on some significant Canadian criminal cases. The most heinous trip down memory lane is the detailed recounting of the trials of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. Ultimately, this is to make a point about power gained by the French and Mahaffy families allowing them to influence policy and demand the destruction of key evidence, which in turn lead to career-ending side effects for one true-crime writer. But it’s difficult to get enraged about this particular thing when you realize that Homolka is living free and clear somewhere in Quebec with three children of her own.
A quick aside about Bernardo:
He was recently up for parole review, having served the requisite time on his life sentence for murder. At that time, a provocatively-worded news headline resulted in a slew of misplaced outrage on social media, from people demanding to know how he was “allowed out” and criticising the justice system. Of course, a ten second google search would have revealed the truth, but that’s not really how our world works these days. Seriously, people. Ten seconds! And if you have a mobile phone, you literally don’t even have to move from where you are to do this. Ok, rant over.
Christie’s book had one funny bit:
…playing Trivial Pursuit with some considerably younger friends, the fellow read aloud a question about Malcolm X. We nearly fell off our chairs when he pronounced it as “Malcolm the Tenth…
Our collective ignorance is endlessly entertaining!
Ultimately, the lesson here is that spending 2 or 3 decades as a reporting observing the trials and court proceedings of some of the most heinous criminals in modern Canadian history can make you jaded. Probably not that surprising, really …
Rating: Skip it, unless you really want to read about the various trial details or you have an above-average interest in the internal workings of the criminal justice system.
“I just don’t think we are all going to die from a bad case of Justice System corruption.“
This made me laugh. Thanks for putting this book in perspective. I’m going to skip it…
Interesting! I really like listening to Christie Blatchford on 1010 CFRB when she’s on the panels. Does she believe there’s a systemic problem in our justice system, or just some judges or individual cases that were troubling?
She believes it’s systemic. A problem of lack of effective oversight, giving too much power to victim families who are biased and don’t understand our justice system or it’s purpose. I think you would enjoy it, if you liked listening to her.