From a Blog.
Lets see if the main stream media pick this up, and where it is placed. Of interest also because of the F-35 and law & order issues. The guy was a Judge.
http://blog.decisioncanada.ca/conservatives/liberal-candidate-suggest-some-sexual-assault-offenders-should-not-go-to-jail/
Liberal candidate suggests some sexual assault offenders should not go to jail
April 7, 2011. 10:16 am • Section: Conservatives, Liberals
OTTAWA — John Reilly, the Liberal candidate for Wild Rose, is coming under attack for suggesting last month that some sexual offenders should not go to jail.
The Conservative Party is handing out transcripts and audio clips from an interview Reilly, a retired provincial court judge with 35 years experience on the bench, did with The Rutherford Show on March 31, 2011.
The Rutherford Show with guest John Reilly
Reilly went on to say that in a specific case where a young 19, 20, year-old man who penetrated a woman with his fingers should not go to jail for three years.
You can listen to the whole interview on the Rutherford’s website, click March 31, 2011. Select the 10:00 AM hour. Rutherford spoke with Reilly at 9:25 and took calls from listeners at 27:00.
Reilly, who has been described as a maverick, told Rutherford he was inspired to run because he believes “the vast majority of the people who have appeared in front of me over my thirty-plus years on the bench are disadvantaged poor people, uneducated a lot of them have learning difficulties, a lot of them with drug addictions.
I see the majority of people as needing help, and what motivated me to just resign my position and run in this election is that I was disgusted by the Conservative government policies that have all these mandatory minimums. And I see those policies as policies that will incarcerate thousands of people that don’t need to be incarcerated, and the cost is billions of dollars.”
Reilly could not be immediately reached for comment.
This is the full transcript:
….his name is John Reilly and you would think a guy who has that kind of attitude towards the criminal justice system, personal responsibility, liability, he might be you know, sort of a tough guy. He says ‘I’m not that guy anymore.’ He’s going to run for the federal Liberals in the riding of Wild Rose because he does not like some of the things coming from the criminal justice reform agenda of the Conservative Party. Can I still call you Judge Reilly, John?
JR: You can call me anything you want to…
Host: Just don’t call me late for dinner, I know.
JR: I’m not a judge anymore.
Host: Alright.
JR: So you can just call me John.
Host: Call you John. Alright, listen John, what I said in the introduction was correct. People who have seen you in court, we’ve seen some of your decisions, we’ve seen you on the bench, at least we think we’ve seen you on the bench, for over 30 years in the criminal justice system doing a certain thing. Have you changed your attitude?
JR: Well, no, I think I wasn’t sure about that guy you were talking about. I’ve always thought that I had the reputation as the soft touch. I have criticized the concepts of punishment and deterrents for their own sake. My position in relation to criminal law is that I think you have to make a decision between whether you just want to punish crime which I think is an attitude that’s somewhat prevalent, whether you just want to punish it or whether you actually want to reduce it, and while there are some people who are bad and just need to be locked away, I think the vast majority of the people who have appeared in front of me over my thirty-plus years on the bench are disadvantaged poor people, uneducated, a lot of them have learning difficulties, a lot of them with drug addictions. I see the majority of people as needing help. And what motivated me to just resign my position and run in this election is that I was disgusted by the Conservative government policies that have all these mandatory minimums. And I see those policies as policies that will incarcerate thousands of people that don’t need to be incarcerated, and the cost is billions of dollars. And of course, the other thing that motivated me is that the party was found to be in contempt of Parliament because they had, the had these policies and also their F-35 policies that were going to cost the taxpayers of Canada billions of dollars and they were trying to pass that legislation without telling us how much it was going to cost. That was the contempt of Parliament, and that was sort of the icing on the cake for me running in this election. I
Host: Wait a second, John, you’re talking about the cost of criminal justice reforms, is that mostly what you’re, not the jets?
JR: I mention the jets because that was part of the contempt of Parliament motion that has caused this election. But it was also the cost of the criminal justice initiatives — which I understand might be as high as six billion dollars — their prison expansion policies. And you know, they’ve been doing this in the United States and they finally decided that they were wrong. They had all these mandatory sentences in California, and they were locking up so many people that it was bankrupting the state of California, so one day last year, Arnie Swartzeneger just releases forty thousand prisoners and goes on national television to tell the people ‘Don’t worry about this because these people aren’t dangerous.’ Well, my question is: if they’re not dangerous, why are we locking them up in the first place?
Host: But you know that the California situation was not just a one-off, there all kinds of other problems in the California economy, not just the cost of incarceration. But it was one of the things the governments do, yes. But, some new stats, I mean our analysis of incarceration statistics, John, are here. As my last, I talked about this with Dr. Ian Lee, who is a professor at Carleton, myths and urban legends surrounding crime in Canada, pretty extensive report. He said ‘You know, it’s really tough to get into federal prison in Canada. It’s not just stealing a piece of pizza.’ It’s hard to get into prison, you got to kill people, rape people, be in gangs, you know. It’s hard to get into federal prison, John. We don’t just throw pizza thieves in there.
JR: You know, I have had a number of cases that I’ve written judgments on where the crown prosecutor is saying the starting point for this offence is three years in the federal penitentiary. And one lad that I think of who was a cocaine addict he’d buy half a dozen hits and sell three of them to pay for the ones he was using, he managed to do this a few times with undercover officers, and he is now in front of me and it was kind of funny, that I looked at this young man and he was sweating and looked pale, looked like he was going to faint, and I asked him is something wrong, and the crown prosecutor said ‘This man just came up and said he’ll plead guilty to charges of trafficking cocaine and wondered what we were looking for by way of sentencing?’ and I told him three years. And so I said, well you know, what you should do is talk to a lawyer and if you want to proceed with this guilty plea we should get a pre-sentence report, we should find out some stuff about you and decide what we’re going to do. And I ended up giving this young man a sentence of two years less a day that I allowed him to serve in the community, a conditional sentence order. And this is about four years ago. The crown wanted him to go to a federal penitentiary. I left him on the street. Part of the conditional sentence order was treatment and also community service work. He did his community service work, he successfully completed his conditional sentence order and this is now some four years later, and I was down at the Victory store dropping some stuff off that we were donating a month or two ago, and this guy says ‘Hi Judge Reilly!’ and it’s the guy. And he’s still doing, he still goes down and does volunteer work at the Victory store. And you know, I can’t tell you thousands of those stories, but they wanted him in the federal penitentiary, and I wouldn’t do it, but I’m afraid that there are a lot of people in his position that are going there, and they’re soft. If that boy, boy, young man, would not have survived a federal penitentiary.
Host: Judge Reilly, John, no, it’s good to hear those, you analyze a situation, you looked at the kid, you realized this guy is not a dangerous criminal, et cetera, great. That’s your role, isn’t it?
JR: The role that I think the Conservatives are trying to take away from judges.
Host: But you’ve got also, you can’t deny that 70% of inmates in federal prisons are there for violent crimes. First and second degree murder, sex assault, arson, kidnapping. Those, 70% of them judge, so it’s not again they’re just a bunch of innocent people sitting in prison. There’s some bad dudes in there.
JR: There are. But I believe that the percentage of ‘bad dudes’ that are in there is a lot lower than the, I mean, this is one of my problems with the criminal justice system the way it is, is that I say we put too much emphasis on the offence and not enough emphasis on the offender. If you’re looking at what the Conservative government wants to do is say if this is the offence, you go to jail. And that’s going to put people in jail that don’t need to be there.
Host: But what kind of offences though?
JR: Sexual assault.
Host: You shouldn’t go to jail for a sex assault?
JR: Well, you know, there are sexual assaults and there are sexual assaults.
Host: Sure?
JR: And I had another young man, not a young offender, but a 19, 20 year old. He’s at a party, there’s a lot of sexual innuendo, one of these women is being very aggressive with her boyfriend and they’re drinking a lot, the boyfriend passes out, she goes, gets into bed naked, he goes up, he’s thinking he’s going to be able to, that she’ll probably agree to have sex with him, he fondles her privates, and she wakes up and tells him to go away, and he goes away. They report it, he’s charged with sexual offence, he has digitally penetrated her, the crown prosecutor says this is a digital penetration of a woman’s vagina, he should go to jail for three years, that’s the starting point for this sexual offence. And I’m looking at this 20 year old, socially inept young man, and his offence is a sexual assault and it’s one that they consider a major sexual assault because it involves digital penetration. I don’t think in those circumstances that that what happened there should put that young man in a penitentiary for three years.
Host: Unless it’s your daughter, and then maybe you’ve got a whole another perspective! You haven’t mentioned the word ‘victim’ once yet!
JR: You know, I am concerned about victims, but what I’m concerned about is our society as a whole. Often, these minimum sentences that I’m stuck with, if I have an assault occasioning bodily harm, that’ll qualify now as a crime of violence. Again, a couple of guys have too much to drink in a bar and get into a fight, maybe somebody gets hit with a glass. I had a woman in front of me who was charged with assault occasioning bodily harm. She was drunk, guy offended her, she went to throw the beer in her glass in his face and she hit his face with the glass and it broke and there was huge damage done to his face. Now, they’re saying she’s got to go to jail, this is an aggravated assault because it has caused serious bodily injury.
Host: You say booze.
JR: No, I just say is this a person that needs to go to a federal penitentiary, and if I can keep her out of the federal penitentiary, that guy has just suffered a big financial loss, because this is going to cost him a lot. If we send the offender to jail automatically, this is the offence he’s committed, he’s not able to earn the money that’s going to allow him to make restitution for the damage he’s done. And so some of these things you know….
Host: John, hang on, don’t go away, I want to continue. And I have people that want to ask you questions, I do need to take a break here John. John Reilly back after this!
