🚀 go-pugleaf

Let us suppose that I were charged with a criminal offence.

There are two possibilities: either I am guilty, or I am innocent.

Ignoring, for the moment, the chance that the trial will return an
incorrect result, then we have two cases to consider.

I, blameless of any wrongdoing, am vindicated. Hence, I should not be
sent to jail, and I am not sent to jail. But is it fair that I should
be saddled with heavy legal costs?

I am convicted as I deserve. Now, I must make full restitution to my
victims. Is it fair that I should have been able to take any of the
money that I now owe them - and spent it on trying to wriggle out of
my deserved fate by hiring a fancy lawyer?

Thus, I would like to propose an idea (except, as we shall see, it has
an important flaw):

The "Canada Justice Act".

Based on the two cases above, when someone goes to court, charged with
a crime, he should neither be obligated to (because he may be
innocent, and thus he should not have to pay out of his own pocket),
nor permitted to (because he may be guilty, and thus owe every cent he
has to his own victim, as well as an insurance premium for the victims
of other crimes whose perpetrators had no money to pay restitution
with) pay money to defense counsel.

So, as with the "Canada Health Act", there should be a law clearly
establishing that lawyers can't extra-bill legicare, or provide legal
services directly to clients, and so on.

Of course, it is still easy to see why this is a bad idea. Just as we
have an independent judiciary, rather than having judges work directly
for politicians or the police, if all the lawyers worked for the
government, this could make it hard for someone's case to be heard if
it did not suit the mood of the government of the day.

Perhaps something like this could be done with adequate safeguards;
after all, we do have court-appointed defence lawyers for those
without means, and, while it was an unusual precedent, a lawyer was
sued for fees recieved out of moneys owed elsewhere recently.

But right now, I don't know how many people have a clear understanding
of our ancient liberties to properly deal with the problem of crime.
For example, in Edmonton, an 11-year-old boy is alleged to have held
up a bank with a toy gun, and his mother is accused of involvement.
Instead of focusing on the horror that someone could take money from
other people that didn't belong to him or her, though, the local paper
ran a story yesterday of a day-care in New Zealand that makes efforts
to ensure that children play cops and robbers in accord with local
reality.

I don't know if we can properly talk about an absolute right to own
weapons, because I don't think anyone wants their neighbor to be able
to just go down to, say, Canadian Tire (or even have to go to a
specialist supplier from the Yellow Pages) and pick up a thermonuclear
warhead. But Nazi Germany, Fascist Spain, and Communist Russia all
illustrate how it is much easier to run a dictatorship when you make
sure no private citizens have guns.

So we need to carefully distinguish between ways of getting tougher on
crime that *only affect criminals*, and other things which could be
dangerous - which crime, as it continues getting out of hand might
lead people to assent to in panic - which might make life simpler, but
in dangerous ways for the rest of us, for policemen or politicians.

But right now, there seems to be little sign of *either* concern,
*both* of which should be serious committments from every single MP in
Ottawa:

a serious committment to ensure that every honest citizen can live a
life free of fear of crime, which is rare, and which is forced to hide
in gutters and dark places, and

a steadfast loyalty to the fundamental principles of democracy, in
which the fundamental and absolute rights of citizens, which are
inherent in their nature as rational beings (they may only be viewed
as 'granted' if the grantor is no One less than God Himself: in other
words, denial of 'natural law theory' is not merely an error, but a
heresy against democracy) are respected by the government even as they
must be respected by other citizens.

As an example of the failure of the second concern, one can cite
Canada's hate literature laws. While many forms of propagandizing for
racial hatred can properly be outlawed, the laws as they stand
overstep the bounds of what democracy permits, because they even
prohibit calm, rational, scholarly advocacy of things like genocide.
Does anyone think that if advocates of racism are restricted to such
channels, that anyone will really be impressed with whatever facts
could be argued to support genocide?

(I am basically claiming that it is OK to deny to those who advocate
racial discrimination the use of intemperate language, the use of
deliberate falsehoods, and the use of narrative and dramatic forms, in
their pursuit without violating the core of freedom of speech.)

A democracy must not set the dangerous precedent of outlawing the
expression of ANY point of view, however offensive it might be to
others. But it is perfectly legitimate to regulate such things as the
media of mass entertainment; this dichotomy is also applicable to the
debate over pornography.

John Savard
http://home.ecn.ab.ca/~jsavard/crypto.htm