Our legal quagmire

The discrepancy between the Majesty of the Law and its execution has been widening noticeably in recent years.

Innocent people have gone to jail, spending the best years of their lives behind bars waiting for someone or something to come forward and clear their name. Two of the more familiar in this regard are David Milgaard and Donald Marshall. Other names will surely be added as greater use is made of DNA testing.

Others have their good names ruined by unfounded charges of the most odious nature. Guy-Paul Morin has been there, as have a host of individuals wrongly accused of child molestation and the like. Too often, the legal system unwittingly lends itself to those with an axe to grind or an agenda to promote.

Important public initiatives are too often stalled by civil litigation, launched by those with dubious claims to standing. The cases are heard, and it can take weeks, if not months, to receive a verdict. Witness the case of Nanticoke's new town hall in Townsend and the zoning challenge mounted against it. The matter was argued at the Cayuga courthouse June 9. Nanticoke council was expecting a verdict the same day, feeling the matter to be fairly straight forward. But here we sit today -- July 30 -- with no decision. It's as if civil and political society exist to serve the justice system, not vice versa.

Vulnerable people are arrested, charged with serious crimes, then left to languish in jail while the system gets around to arranging a bail hearing. If not next week, then maybe the week after. Witness the case of 19-year-old Kristy Jeannette Wood of Simcoe, charged with the murder of an infant child. She was arrested June 26, her guilt or innocence yet to be determined. Regardless, the system wasn't able to arrange a bail hearing until July 7, causing her family needless anguish. Inexcusable.

Important judgments are handed down which turn community standards on their ear, substituting the so-called tyranny of the majority for the tyranny of the minority. Consider the Ontario Court of Appeal ruling on toplessness. With that judgment, the Court of Appeal has imposed a vision on society that the vast majority reject, including our elected representatives. The situation illustrates that democracy is undermined when burdened by an unaccountable, activist judiciary. Why shouldn't our judges be elected, just as they are in the United States? Why do we persist in the belief that patronage appointees make for a superior brand of justice?

Meanwhile, justice remains unaffordable because the layman needs a navigator through the unfamiliar waters of the courts, and lawyers don't come cheaply. They make our legal system a maze, then get rich leading people through it. Good, hard-working individuals are broken down to nothing because they've been unjustly drawn into a system that bleeds its citizens dry. The courts are quick to invoke the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to protect the guilty, but they are too often silent when the system runs roughshod through the gardens of innocent lives.

It is not only laymen and citizens who share these concerns. In quiet, unguarded moments, people within the system itself lament its many dysfunctions, and even they feel powerless to change things.

The well-run society respects its legal system. It doesn't fear or regret it. Reform is of the essence and long overdue, but where are the men and women of vision to tackle this Augean stable?

-- Monte Sonnenberg