Major Acid's E-Rag
It Strikes Me...
That Murder is a Public Act
May 16, 2005
The petition showed up in my e-mail as one more piece of junk mail I was
reading to avoid work. The petition urged me to support the French and
Mahaffey families in their attempts to ban a TV movie about the
Bernardo/Homolka murders of the families’ daughters. It seems the French
and Mahaffey families want to throw a shroud of silence over those
terrible events.
In this, they are wrong. Murder is a public act, one that demands a
response from the whole of the publicly supported justice system, from
police to judges to prisons, all funded by your taxes and mine. More
importantly, murder demands that we ask questions. Why would anyone do
what Bernardo and Homolka did? What might have been done to prevent the
murders? How can we look at those thousands of nameless people we crowd
past daily at work and at play, or those dozens we vaguely “know in
passing”, and spot the next Bernardo? What can we learn from the
police’s handling of the case?
Murder is a public act, and the deaths of the French and Mahaffey girls
is public business. As badly as the families may feel about their
losses, their losses are public. Their grief, if they choose, is
private, but the rest is ours to chew over, even if that chewing comes
in the form of what seems likely to be just another mediocre,
made-for-TV film about bad people doing horrible things. The families
don’t get to say no.
In fact, the trial itself should never have proceeded as it did, with
audio only moments and publication bans. How are we, the public at
large, expected to have confidence in a process that hides itself from
view? To paraphrase, justice must not only be done, it must be seen to
be done. If this distresses the French and Mahaffey families, they have
my sympathy, but nothing else.
The justice system we have was set up to deal with offenders. It was not
and should not be a system to assuage the feelings of the victims.
Victims do not always have, probably seldom have, objectivity. The more
the justice system bends itself into a pretzel to accommodate the wishes
of the victims, the less confidence you and I should have that the
system is functioning fairly. Victims become vigilantes, fixated on
whatever perpetrator the police present them with, hijacking control of
a public process at every level from sentencing to parole hearings.
In the States, the recent Scott Peterson trial was a case in point. It
didn’t matter that the evidence was scanty and circumstantial, Scott had
to pay, and he had to pay with his life. Nothing else would do. Only
then could Lacey and the family “rest in peace”.
Except
Except, what if the man was innocent? Ask Guy Paul Morin about that.
Scanty, circumstantial evidence sent him to jail, too, but he didn’t
kill the little girl he was supposed to have killed. The emerging
science around DNA saved him eventually, but I suspect there are many
out there so emotionally welded to him as the killer that they believe
he did it and damn the science.
Our justice system is increasingly prone to being bent to serve the aims
of the victims. The Air India trial is good example. Yes, stupid things
were done to the evidence by competing government agencies, the RCMP and
CSIS. And yes, the system moved slowly. Yet eventually the trial came
and went, and now the victims’ families are indignant. They didn’t get
the verdict they feel they were owed, and they don’t have men to point
to as killers. They demand inquiries. Somebody must pay, and if we don’t
agree we are all, apparently, racists.
But they are wrong. The justice system does not exist for the emotional
convenience of the victims. It tries to find the criminals, tries to
prosecute the criminals. Often the system is successful. Sometimes it’s
not. And sometimes it’s successful in prosecuting the innocent.
Who put the bombs on that Air India flight? I don’t know, though I’d
like to. The prosecution thought it knew, but couldn’t convince a
dispassionate judge that its theory about who the killers were was
provable, so the judge said, “not guilty.”
The families are incensed, and the justice system and most of Canada, in
the families’ eyes, is racist. Apparently the one thing the families
don’t want to know is that there are some in the Canadian Indian or Sikh
community who are said to know the killers but won’t speak up. This is
the public lesson we need to learn from the Air India mass murders, and
it is the lesson we wouldn’t even be thinking about if the judge had
played along, nodded and winked to the families, and said “guilty”.
Murder is a public act. It teaches us all lessons, even lessons we don’t
want to learn. In the aftermath of the Air India trial I learned that
there, supposedly, those in the Sikh community in Canada who would let
mass murder go unpunished, maybe out of fear, maybe out of political
sympathy. I don’t know which it is, but I want to. If we figure out why,
the chance of another Air India is significantly reduced.
I learned from the Bernardo and Homolka trials that some people are so
twisted they will kill their own sisters, let alone strangers. I want to
know why that happens, too.
All of us should want to know why, but if we shut down the public aspect
of the justice system – out of some misplaced, politically correct
sympathy for the victims – we will all be cut off from even knowing the
questions to ask. Worse, we will have to “trust” that the system
functions fairly.
I have my doubts that I will find the answers I seek in a TV movie about
Bernardo and Homolka, yet consider what goes into such a project. The
creators, from the writers to the producers, will have researched the
event, read the news accounts, read the trial transcripts (if
available), read books by journalists (if the police don’t succeed in
harassing them into non-existence), interviewed those willing to speak.
A vision of the events will have been constructed, emended by the
director’s personal vision, coloured by the actors’ portrayals. The
results won’t be the “truth”. Yet the film, well or poorly done, is
likely to help me frame important questions, and this is not something
the French and Mahaffey families should ever be allowed to prevent.
The e-mail I received reads, in part, “Let’s be decent. Let’s be
Canadian.” Apparently being Canadian means that I must place the
feelings of the French and Mahaffey families above all else. It goes on
to say, “The parents of the two teenage girls that were victims of
sexual assault and murdered have been trying to prevent this film from
being made. Let's see what protest we can make to support them in their
efforts.”
What this really asks is that I allow a public act, and by extension the
whole of the justice system (not to mention the entire cultural industry
of North America) to be controlled by the emotional wants of few private
citizens. It is the worst sort of emotional blackmail, and I won’t pay.
As badly as I feel for the families of the victims, I won’t let that
sympathy be directed towards the dismantling of public justice in
Canada. In the end, no matter how terrible the result for the victims
and their survivors, murder is a public act.
