Canadian Court: You Can Be Charged With A Gun Crime Even If You Don’t Actually Have A Gun
Threatening someone with a gun may be enough to warrant being charged with a firearms offence, even if one isn’t being carried, Canada’s top court ruled Friday.
In a unanimous ruling, the nine-member Supreme Court of Canada upheld a court decision in B.C. that convicted a man of gun possession, even though he argued he never had the weapon on him during a break-in four years ago.
Sure. Why not. Forget that these men were already guilty of breaking and entering as well as robbery. Let’s go ahead and slap a gun charge on them too, because they pretended to have a gun.
This reminds me of a case in Michigan where a man was charged with criminal sexual conduct, carrying a sentence of life in jail, after having consensual sex with a cocktail waitress. See, in Michigan, if you engage in sexual activity during the commission of another crime (in this instance the man was selling drugs illegally to the waitress) that sex is automatically criminalized.
This set up a situation where adultery in the state of Michigan (considered a felony) is also a sex crime and can be punished by life in jail. Sound absurd? It is.
But that’s what happens when we allow legislators to essentially make up new criminal charges to pile on defendants. Prosecutors routinely use a tactic called “overcharging” where they pile all sorts of criminal charges on a defendant in order to bully them into plea bargains. A person just facing a robbery charge might be willing to take his chances in a jury trial, but a person facing robbery charges along with a myriad of other charges (like maybe a firearms charge for pretending he had a gun) all for the same incident, thus risking a lot more time in jail, isn’t as likely to take the chance. Which may sound like a good thing to some people, but it’s resulted in fewer trials (thus fewer reviews of police/prosecutor practices and procedures by vigorous defense lawyers) and a ballooning prison population.
Plus, I often get the feeling that many of these prosecutors would nothing more than to see nearly every aspect of our lives be susceptible to criminal charges with the only thing keeping most of us out of prison being their discretion.
Regardless, it seems to me that people should only get charged with one crime for every criminal act they make. For instance, if you mug a guy for his tennis shoes you should be charged with that crime only. Not some additional “hate” crime because you’re white and your mugging victim happens to be white. Also, if you’re dealing drugs and you get caught you should be held responsible only for dealing the drugs, not for an additional crime because you happened to be within 1,000 feet of a school when you did it.
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robert108
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