Originally Posted by
john-e
One of the many things I like about Canada is that the justice system is one of the fairest around. Punishments for serious crimes are premised on the rehabilitation of the offender rather than the eye-for-an-eye position; i.e. you can't rehabilitate someone who's dead, so we don't kill them.
Re drug use, it's treated as a misdemeanour for soft drugs like marijuana, usually no jail time until your third offence and even then you're more likely to get off with probation/suspended sentence. First-degree murderers receive life sentences which do not mean life. I think it's 25 years with eligibility for parole after 15.
What's really great is that all punishments are scalable on a wide range, mostly depending on what the judge decides. And anyone can be classified as a dangerous offender in which case you are imprisoned indefinitely. However, this punishment is only used in extreme cases where the offender shows no remorse and no signs of rehabilitation.
Granted, it's not a perfect system. There are cases of prisoners being released early only to re-offend almost right away, but these are relatively few. At least we don't practice state-sanctioned murder.
My personal view on capital punishment is this. There are people alive today who probably deserve to die. But there are also alot of people who are dead today that deserved to live. We can't give them life, so what right do we have to kill those who (we think) deserve it? So until we figure out how to raise the dead, I say let them live.
Then there's the subject of wrongful convictions; we can release those people from prison and provide what compensation we can, but what do we do if someone is executed and then found innocent? Execute the judge, jury, and executioner? Being human means making mistakes and I would not want to risk having an innocent's blood on my hands.