Lucas Oleniuk/TORONTO STAR / Fred Chartrand/CP
If hard criminals do soft time in Canada, as the federal Conservative government insists, then John Virgil Punko seems a poster boy for all that’s wrong with the judicial system. In police jargon, Punko was “a low-level mope”—a full-patch member of the Vancouver East End Hells Angels with a healthy dose of greed and a bad addiction to Percocet. Such vulnerabilities made him a useful target in 2003 when the RCMP launched E-Pandora, a $10-million sting operation aiming at netting the big fish in the East End Angels.
Punko got into methamphetamine production with Michael Plante, an “official friend” of the gang—one the RCMP had secretly turned into a paid informant. Business went well; in late 2004 they expanded into cocaine trafficking. By July 2005—when police swept in, arresting six Angels and a dozen associates—Punko had amassed $381,000 in drug profits, and a world of trouble. Found guilty of provincially prosecuted weapons and mischief charges, he was sentenced in July 2009 to five years and three months—a penalty effectively reduced to a day because he’d been in custody since his arrest. Finally, in late 2009, he faced a series of high-stakes federally prosecuted drug charges.
It was before British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Peter Leask that his luck changed for the better. Leask rejected the Crown’s attempt to prosecute Punko as a member of a criminal organization, the Hells Angels. In exchange, Punko pleaded guilty of conspiracy to produce meth, to trafficking in cocaine and to possessing the proceeds of crime.
This March, Leask set the sentence at six years for conspiracy, five years for trafficking and three years for the proceeds of crime. Then the mathematics of the justice system kicked in. He ruled the sentences would be served “concurrently” (at the same time), compressing the 14 years into six. He deducted a year as a reward for pleading guilty, and another year to mitigate police conduct (Plante had fed his partner’s addiction with police-provided painkillers). Finally, Punko got a two-for-one credit for the “dead time” in custody before his conviction, a 34-month reduction.
The ruling boiled Punko’s 14-year sentence down to 14 months. Police were frustrated. The prosecutors appealed. An outraged public had its perceptions confirmed: criminals are running roughshod over the justice system. “It really called into question the integrity of the judiciary when you get a decision that is so out of whack,” says John Martin, a criminologist at the University of the Fraser Valley. “Mercifully, that doesn’t happen a lot of the time.”
Such cases make the Conservatives’ anti-crime crusade one of the strongest trump cards in their agenda. To argue against it, as opposition parties have done rather ineffectively, is to be labelled “soft on crime”—as much of a political death sentence in Canada as it has been for decades in the U.S. But good politics isn’t always good policy, critics note. Nor is perception always based on reality.
For one thing, there is little evidence that judges have gotten demonstrably softer in their sentences, according to data assembled for Maclean’s by Juristat, an arm of Statistics Canada. Exceptionally light, headline-grabbing sentences like Punko’s are just that, the exception.
And for that matter, if locking up more people for longer periods is the answer, the United States—with one-quarter of the world’s prisoners in its jails—should be the safest place on Earth. But while Canada is intent on adding to its prison population, America is cutting back, saddled with a massive prison industry it can’t afford. And studies show that reducing prison populations doesn’t necessarily make the streets any more dangerous. Punishment is just one factor in reducing crime, one criminologists warn is often based on emotion rather than sound strategy.
The names of the Tories’ new and proposed laws hammer home longer sentences as the centrepiece of their anti-crime agenda. In 2008 the Tackling Violent Crime Act came into force, mandating tougher mandatory jail time for gun crimes, tougher bail conditions for those accused of gun crimes and the increasing use of indefinite sentences for repeat violent or sexual offenders. Soon to come into force is the Serious Time for the Most Serious Crime Act, removing the so-called faint-hope clause that lets some convicted murderers seek jury hearings to apply for parole before the end of their minimum 25-year sentence.
