Equal Justice Under Law...

...is for bourgeois suckers. And if you like mere financial reparations, you'll love race-based criminal sentencing.

In my last entry, I argued that reparations is a poisonous idea that subverts individual responsibility (and individual virtue) through collective and mostly concocted racial guilt — all with a strong undertow of simply scamming people who earn their money to fork it over to people who don’t. Or at best, whose “earning” consists of professional grievance.

Now here’s the bad news.

The article from The Free Press discussed below gives a chilling preview of what the ideas behind reparations promise for other institutions, the criminal justice system in particular. In our country, criminal justice aspires to, and for the most part (although not always) achieves, the ideal inscribed above the Supreme Court: “Equal Justice Under Law.” The cornerstone of that aspiration is treating people as individuals, based on their behavior. You are responsible for what you do. You are not responsible for what other people do.

Well, that’s old fashioned thinking. Our neighbors to the north are showing us a more “progressive” path.

Edward Smith didn’t think the color of his skin had anything to do with it. 

He was 23, and he’d come to Canada in 2005 from West Africa. Now, he lived with his mother and sister in Edmonton, the capital of the western province of Alberta.

Racism—overt or systemic—didn’t make him take part in an armed robbery of an Airbnb in July 2019, he said. He’d decided on his own to help his cousin, who had told Smith that the people staying at the Airbnb had robbed him and that he was trying to get his money back. Smith agreed to help, but he didn’t want any guns involved. So they compromised: they’d bring a gun, but it would be unloaded.

Things didn’t go as planned, and Smith was arrested. At his trial, Smith pleaded guilty to the two charges—theft and robbery with a firearm—filed against him. 

Since Smith is black, he also submitted an Impact of Race and Culture Assessment, or IRCA—a presentencing report in which “Black and racialized Canadians” can demonstrate how systemic racism led them to commit their crime. 

And right there you can tell what’s coming.

The logic behind Smith’s IRCA was clear: as a black man, it was assumed that he had been subjected to a great deal of hate, and that that hate had limited his job opportunities, housing opportunities, opportunities to build a meaningful and law-abiding life.

Dunia Nur, the activist who wrote Smith’s IRCA, told me the report was meant to help the judge appreciate the convict’s “background” and “history.” 

Ummmmmm, not really. It was designed to get Smith, solely because he’s black, a lighter sentence than a white person would get for identical behavior. Ms. Nur understandably wants to avoid putting it that way. Hence the vague language.

I obtained Smith’s IRCA from Smith himself. Oddly, the four-page report cites no concrete instances of racism—no violence, no untoward remarks, no employers or schools that turned Smith down because of his skin color. Not even any microaggressions.

It also fails to mention that, in a separate incident in January 2018, Smith was arrested and charged with theft, robbery, and kidnapping. 

Don’t be so judgmental, people. Stuff happens. Besides, some sort of excuse can always be cobbled together, and if under the regime in Canada you happen to be black, it doesn’t need to make a lot of sense:

What it does say is that Smith had a rough childhood and adolescence—the refugee camp in Ghana, his father’s absence, immigrating to Canada, his early run-ins with the law. It further notes that “Edward identifies as an African Canadian” who is of “Liberian heritage,” and that he has “a feeling of disconnection with his culture.”

This is not exactly the Klan running wild. Indeed, it doesn’t so much as hint at discrimination, much less racial discrimination. But still….

The judge apparently sympathized with Smith. In February 2020, after six months in prison, he was allowed to go free with court-appointed supervision. If he’d been white, he would have been looking at eight years behind bars.

Read that sentence again: “If he’d been white, he would have been looking at eight years behind bars.”

“I didn’t face racism,” Smith admitted to me in a recent phone call. He’s now a sales representative at a debt-collection company. Referring to the IRCA, Smith said, “It was my only way out of this situation. I took full advantage.”

**************************************************

The IRCA was at first

…mostly confined to progressive circles in Nova Scotia, which has a higher concentration of African Canadians than any other province. Now, it’s taken for granted among Canadian criminal defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges, and law professors that the assessments are a ‘necessary tool’ for curbing the ‘overrepresentation’ of black and indigenous prisoners.

It seems never to occur to these people that the surest way to curb the “overrepresentation” of blacks in prison is for young black men simply to conduct themselves according to law and get a normal job like the great majority of other black (and white and Hispanic) people do.

[T]here are no statistics on the number of IRCAs being filed nationwide or on a province by province basis. Criminal defense attorneys in Ontario estimated that IRCAs run up to $4,500 and that there’s a nine-month waiting list to obtain one.

Nice cottage industry there, although probably not (yet) as lucrative as the cottage industry of DEI deputy assistant deans throughout academia.

Canada is at the forefront of a broader movement that seeks to reimagine police, prisons, and the nature of justice—a movement that gained much greater momentum and cohesiveness in the wake of George Floyd’s May 2020 killing in Minneapolis.

I do a lot of reading, and I’ve come across a time-saving way to separate good ideas from bad ones. When you see the word “reimagine,” whatever comes next is a bad idea. But just for the record, while Canada might be in the forefront of this debased justice for now, you might want to check right here in the United States with Berkeley (and Stanford and Yale, etc., etc.) come Monday morning.

*********************************************************

The Free Press article continues for many more column inches, but I won’t go on, partly because there is only so much time I can expect from readers but mostly because it’s just too depressing. We are headed toward a system in which members of The Preferred (for the moment) Racial Group get shorter sentences solely because of race, and members of The Non-Preferred Racial Group get longer sentences for the identical conduct, also solely because of race.

I don’t know what that is, exactly. But I know what it’s not. It’s not America, and if we give in to it, we’re giving away our country.