Jesse Kline: Another judge comes to the rescue of heartless murderers

Members of the De Jong family gather outside the Abbotsford, B.C., courthouse on Oct. 19, after sentencing for the three men who killed Arnold and Joanne De Jong in May 2022 was delayed. Photo by Glenda Luymes/Postmedia

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Crime has become a major issue in this country, but the courts seem determined to ensure our criminal justice system is nothing more than a revolving door that constantly throws potentially dangerous offenders back onto the streets.

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On Monday, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Brenda Brown found that the rule preventing people convicted of multiple murders from requesting parole for 25 years infringes their Charter right not to be subjected to “cruel and unusual” punishment, which is a very broad interpretation of that specific right.

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The court proceedings are still ongoing meaning that the judge hasn’t issued a written justification for her ruling and could still find the ban on multiple murderers utilizing the “faint hope” clause to be justified under Sec. 1 of the Charter — i.e., that it’s “demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”

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Even if it stands, the ruling could be overturned by a higher court. But absolutely no one will be surprised if the Supreme Court of Canada ultimately claims there is little distinction between spending 25 years in a Canadian prison and getting waterboarded in a CIA black site.

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After all, in 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that sending Alexandre Bissonnette to prison without parole for 150 years after killing six worshippers and seriously injured five others at a mosque counted us cruel and unusual punishment and was therefore unconstitutional.

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That same year, three men — Abhijeet Singh, Gurkaran Singh and Khushveer Toor — broke into a home in Abbotsford, B.C., and brutally murdered an elderly couple, Arnold and Joanne De Jong. The three men worked for a cleaning service that the De Jongs had hired and hatched a plan to rob the house.

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They knew “that if the De Jongs saw them during the home invasion, they may be identified.… Because of this, they could not leave the De Jong’s alive at the conclusion of the home invasion,” wrote Justice Brown in her decision finding them guilty in May.

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“I find as the only reasonable inference from the evidence that in order for the home invasion to succeed, the plan required the murders of the De Jongs.”

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The result was especially gruesome: Arnold De Jong was found asphyxiated in his bed, his head wrapped in duct tape; his wife had her throat slit and was bludgeoned to death. This, according to the court, was both “planned and deliberate” — in other words, it was entirely premeditated.

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And yet, when lawyers for the convicted murderers challenged their ineligibility for early parole, Justice Brown thought it entirely reasonable not only to entertain the notion, but to redefine the constitutional protection against “cruel and unusual treatment or punishment” to include sentences that are completely within international norms.

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Indeed, the U.S. Bill of Rights also prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments,” but this does not stop the state from delivering multiple lethal injections to the same inmate, musing about live-streaming a firing squad or handing out life sentences that actually last a lifetime.