Captive in Canada

The Funding Crisis - A New Battle Ground for the “presumed innocents”

SPECIAL For Captiveincanada.com - 22-nov-07

The Funding Crisis - A New Battle Ground for the “presumed innocents”

There is another new shock.  This comes shortly after the shock of the prosecution unilaterally canceling their agreement with the defense lawyers and stopping the preliminary hearing.  Now the shock is the battle the defense lawyers have with Legal Aid. The lawyers have agreed on an approach to calculate and apply for the hours needed for the motions due to the cancellation of the preliminary hearing. However, Legal Aid came back with “much” less hours, according to some of the lawyers, than what they need to prepare and conduct a fair defense on behalf of their clients. Four of the lawyers have already accepted the hours assigned to them. However, the rest did not. They announced that they will not proceed with any legal work until this matter is settled.

The dilemma of the accused is now doubled in size. They have to battle on two fronts.  First, is the government, who is working hard to prevent the accused from getting a decent defense and to prolong their incarceration for as long as they can. Second is the new battle is with the defense lawyers, who are putting the motions and the trial off until the monetary issues are settled. The loser in this process is merely the “presumed innocents”. They are spending their time in jail, without bail, for an extra indefinite time until those two parties get over the money issue.

It is unclear to any one who is responsible for such delay! Is it the group of lawyers who announced that they are unhappy with the hours assigned by the legal aid? Is it greed that moves these lawyers to take such a stand, in spite of the extra time their clients will spend suffering in custody? Or, is it an honest stand by defense lawyers to guarantee minimum hours of research and prep work to better represent their clients? No one can really answer this question.

The “presumed innocents” and their families are skeptical of every thing and every one. They see what maneuvers the prosecution does to simply make these young men stay in jail and serve a sentence of years and years before they get to the trial, as they know that they will get out at the end of the trial. No judge or jury will take the like of the evidence that was presented in the preliminary hearing, seriously.

It is another way of the twisted justice, another way of being unfair while hiding under the umbrella of the Law, another way of prosecuting and sentencing people before they stand trial. It is, again, an additional shameful stand by a government whose tactics have always been questioned and condemned by decent and liberal Canadians.
 

Related: Toronto 18

November 22nd, 2007 News, Opinions | no comments | Email it! |  Print This Post | 185 views