God love Canada's justice system, eh?
Some defence lawyer is pissed because of a Conservative government plan to get rid of a time-served credit for people waiting to go on trial, meaning that if you commit (allegedly of course) a crime and spend time in custody before your trial, you get credited for two days served of your sentence for every one day actually served.
Say what? Why are we giving criminals credit for anything? Oh, it must have been tough spending 30 days in a detention centre for raping the old lady, so when you get sentenced, we'll just round that 30 days up to 60 and knock that off your time in jail. High five!
This lawyer, Mark Ertel, sounds like just the king of guy that gives criminal defence lawyers the type of not so amazing reputation they have. I can get on board with knocking the actual number of days served pre-trial of a sentence, but barely. The idea of two-for-ones is insane.
I'm not saying I support the idea of getting rid of this farce as a detterent to people committing crime, because as University of Ottawa criminology Prof. Irvin Waller put it in a story in the Ottawa Sun today, "we know the length of prison sentences makes no difference to deterrence."
I buy that. I just don't see why we should reward criminals for hanging out in jail before their trials.
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