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Canadian judges routinely give lighter sentences to immigrants than citizens for the same crimes. This started in 2013, when an immigrant was convicted and sentenced to 2 years for drug trafficking, and successfully argued that it should be two years less a day to avoid extra immigration consequences. Now, a sex offender gets discharged instead of sentenced after being found guilty.
From another case:
To which I respond: Good. The tests for citizenship, sponsorship, and professional licenses are supposed to exclude sex offenders, and doing so by looking at criminal convictions and sentence length should be a reliable standard. Instead, the judge decided he didn't like what they would do with accurate reports, so he gave a different answer instead.
If I was in charge of the professional licensing body or citizenship and immigration, that would piss me off to no end. I want to know if the accused's conduct was 90-days-of-prison bad, or not that bad. Given that information, I would choose to kick them out (or not). Instead, the judge is taking that out of my hands by reporting whether it's 90-days-of-prison-and-loss-of-licence-and-deportation-and-etc. bad or not. If the judge doesn't share my opinion on the value of a sex-offender-free workplace (and there's no indication that he does), then I can't trust that he summed it up properly.
Also: The Onion hits different 14 years later: Being tried as a black man would be great given how pervasive sentencing adjustments are.
The problem is that judges are people.
For example, it used to be the procedure in the Netherlands that, assuming good behaviour, you only served two thirds of your sentence. The remaining third you'd normally be on parole.
This was removed in order to be tough on crime, and this changed pretty much nothing, because: judges are people. They're using their judgement. They also know the laws and procedures, including this one. So under the old system, if you really wanted to put someone away for ten years, you'd give fifteen. And now, if they want to put you away for ten years, they just give you the ten.
We also have that same law that foreigners who are sentenced to two years or more in prison, should be deported afterwards. This seems on the face of it like a very reasonable law. If you've done something that bad, we'll probably be better off without you around.
But again: judges are people. If the judge doesn't think someone should be deported, they are not going to hand out a sentence that automatically comes with deportation. They are going to hand out a lighter sentence. So now we're having Afghan rapists sentenced to 20 months.
The politicians are now talking about implementing mandatory minimum sentences in order to fix the problem. My guess is, it won't work. If a judge doesn't want to give a sentence, he won't. If he has to acquit the criminal entirely in order to avoid it, he will.
If you want tougher judgements you need to appoint tougher judges.
I don't see the connection between 'being a person' and therefor automatically being inclined to give foreign rapists light sentences.
To me it doesn't seem reasonable or humane, just cowardly and sick. Being so wrapped up in and simultaneously so blind to ones own twisted moral intuition that it becomes practically impossible to differentiate between the person raping a 15 year old and the person calling them a pig is not 'normal'.
I think it would be a lot more pertinent for people like this to examine their state of mind and how it has managed to drive them towards results such as this. But it seems like we've managed to build an impervious wall that keeps people away from exploring the true extent of the problem and just what feeds these 'outgroup sycophants' to do what they do.
Judges are people in the sense that they have the ability to do what they want. Judges can just change what they do(remember, they're on average very intelligent individuals). This makes bossing them around complicated.
Considering what's on display, it doesn't seem very complicated to boss them around. As they look to be captive by the same process that most others are captive by. The belief is that the ingroup needs to sacrifice to make amends with the outgroup.
People who hold this belief feel it is their moral right to sacrifice other peoples children to make the bigger picture come together. And considering it has been decided as an economic policy to move vast amounts of third world browns around, and Europe has built a justice system based on European peoples and their comparatively more peaceful and redeemable criminals, what else is there for these judges to do? Just like the government and journalists in Sweden who hide the knowledge of race based crime statistics from the public in the name of solidarity and progress. It's literally the only play that makes sense when holding oneself to egalitarian priors.
Judges being people doesn't seem to be a problem at all. It actually looks like a perfectly functioning limb of an unassailable system that one can't be against without being literally Hitler.
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It's also hard to overrule a judge and even harder to get rid of one. They aren't vulnerable to the normal ways of forcing public servants to follow instructions from above. Western democracies are designed to make it difficult for politicians to directly control the judiciary.
Which is yet another reason "Western democracy" needs to go. Bring in an Augustus who will solve this swiftly and decisively.
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There ARE ways to deal with bad judges in Canada. For instance we had a case where a judge asked a raped women why she didn’t simply shut her legs harder. Iirc the law society basically got him off the bench for that, a big No No. if we wanted the public could pressure similar measures, but we probably won’t. Canadians are addicted to being Nice but even moreso to being Not Like Americans. If America is deporting foreigner criminals., why, we’ll just NOT deport them and maybe even give them a reward for it too. See how not American we are? Such moral superiority is truly a reward on its own.
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Yes this problem is everywhere.
Judges were originally given a tenure-like 'life' appointment to protect them from short term blowback from their sentencing, but by doing so the system can't deal with them if they repeatedly hit the defect button against community expectations.
There needs to be a way to indict, recall or otherwise censure judges that do this. Maybe an oversight sentencing board that can be appealed to by victims to review sentencing. And have members of that board be elected for a term of 2-3 years.
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America ran this experiment. Did it fail?
My impression is that the subversion of the punishment now happens when prosecutors refuse to charge or hold criminals or the law is changed on things like felony shoplifting, not judges failing to deliver the legally mandated minimum.
I think the overt politicization of the American judiciary makes it better in this case. Each individual judge may be biased, but since both sides get to appoint judges, and fight over it, the justice system as a whole ends up fairly representative.
In most of Europe on the other hand the justice system is treated as an apolitical, bureaucratic organization. The judges should be professionals, and leave their biases at home. The public shouldn't care about the judges, in the same way that we shouldn't have to care about minor functionaries in other random government departments, who are just hired on the basis of their skill set and are there to do a job.
So in the Netherlands: the Minister of Justice appoints the head of the Council for the Judiciary. This council in turn appoint the heads of the courts. The courts then hire judges. In practice even the ministerial selection is done based on a shortlist, and the courts too make shortlists. The minister could maybe ram through a political appointee if he really wanted (and get everyone to yell InDePeNdEnT JuDiCiArY), but that political appointee would have no institutional support and get nothing done.
This all sounds very nice in theory, but in practice everyone (except, depending on how the election went, the minister) is a fairly serious progressive by now, and they will always make progressive rulings, and hire more progressives. And there's no way to change that except by going full Orban.
I don't actually have much of a problem with this in the American context. The laws are made democratically, and almost everywhere in the US, the district attorney is also an elected position.
If a DA gets elected on the promise not to charge criminals, then indeed doesn't charge criminals, then gets reelected, then clearly the people actually want this. At that point I can't really disagree with it. I disagree with the stance, but not with implementing the results of the vote. If the median voter of e.g. Portland really is this progressive, then yes, so should the government of Portland be.
The problem comes when these people are appointed by "the system" and cannot be removed.
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