The scales of justice are not an arbitrary symbol, but a reminder of the ideal that justice should always be balanced.
I use the word ideal very purposefully here in both its noun and adjective senses being “a standard of perfection; a principle to be aimed at” and “existing only in the imagination; desirable or perfect but not likely to become a reality.”
There are two main reasons justice cannot be perfect. First, justice, as perfection, is in the eye of the beholder. Most people, most of the time, think the application of justice is either too lax or too penal.
Secondly, even in the absence of public opinion, getting it right is exceptionally complicated.
Yet the system strives to get it right by developing and following certain principles. One of these is that a decision should be in the best interest of the offender and not contrary to the public interest.
A balancing act. It might be rare, for example, for jail to be in the best interest of the offender, but for certain offences and/or offenders, no jail would definitely be contrary to the public interest.
For the record, when we talk about the public interest that includes the direct victims of crime. That is why victim impact statements are considered as either mitigating or, more commonly, aggravating factors.
At Yorkton This Week, we kind of work the principle backward in making publishing decisions. Is the story in the best interest of the public and not contrary to the offender’s interest?
I’ve written before about the difference between the public interest and the public being interested. That is perhaps best summed up as “right to know” versus “want to know.”
Again, it is a balancing act. It is probably fairly rare that having his name in the newspaper associated with crime is in a person’s best interest.
Some crime stories are no brainers. Murder, sexual assault, aggravated assault. In these high profile crimes the public interest trumps the offender’s interest both in sentencing and in publishing almost without exception.
Typically, when I pick up the morning docket, I scan the column that has the Criminal Code sections under which the accused people have been charged. I am always interested in 267/268 (assault causing bodily harm/aggravated assault) and 271 (sexual assault), but not so much in 334 (theft) and 430 (mischief). There are exceptions, of course.
Such was the case this week when I saw one docket entry with two charges of 334 (theft) and 354 (possession of property obtained by crime). It has been my considerable experience that when there are only two charges and they are those two charges, it does not usually pan out to be anything of public interest, especially when I have not seen the person’s name on the docket before. Nine times out of 10, it is a petty theft from some retail store (usually Walmart), the person pleads guilty and gets a small fine.
So, I dismissed it. The radio station’s Doug Falconer can back me up on this one, because it totally had not crossed his radar either and he had similarly dismissed it.
When it came back around after being set aside, we found out we could not have been more wrong. It was a very large amount of money ($71,000) taken from a community sports organization (Yorkton United Football Club) by a person in a position of trust (treasurer). The crimes were driven by alcohol, drug and gambling addictions.
That is newsworthy.
What made it even more so, was that this guy had fully paid back the money, a mitigating circumstance that, along with a lack of criminal record got him off without jail time.
While I am on this subject, the RCMP ought to take note of this principle as well. Last week, they forced three area schools into a state of “hold and secure” (a semi-lockdown) because of something they deemed to be a “potentially dangerous situation.” Afterward, they absolutely refused to release any information on said situation.
Apparently, it was in the public interest to lock down three schools scaring the crap out of hundreds of students and parents, but it was not in the public interest to tell them why. That simply does not make sense.
