R.T. Wells is a veteran of the Royal Canadian Navy.In 1976, Pierre Trudeau abolished the death penalty for civilians. The idea was that we’d shifted as a nation from being a pack of primitive intolerants, wanting revenge for wrongdoing, into a more evolved people who understood rehabilitation was superior. One doesn’t have to look far to see where Justin Trudeau got his playbook for manipulating the Canadian public, but guilt and immorality weren’t the only ways the Liberals pushed their point.The most popular argument against the death penalty has always been, ‘the wrong guy’ conundrum. What if a person was framed? Or simply found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time? What if all the evidence pointed to this person’s guilt and it just wasn’t true? Hollywood has made a fortune off this theme while Canadians pay for murderers and serial sex offenders to live out their lives in prison, or worse, in public. We do this because we’ve been convinced that one day we could star in our own real-life version of ‘The Fugitive’ based on antiquated arguments.Like it or not, the world has changed, and one of those changes was a jump in technology. In the 1970s, DNA evidence was unheard of, and it wasn’t until the late 1980s that it became admissible in court. That was a massive gamechanger in the world of catching the right guy. Suddenly, you didn’t need to take the word of a terrified witness about what happened and who did what, when DNA could link a criminal back to their crimes without bias.Then came surveillance cameras. Though they’d technically been around since the 1960s, they weren’t accessible to the average business owner until the 1980s, and weren’t high resolution, digitized, and linked to the internet until the 2000s. Between the cost of security cameras going down and the quality of images going up, these perfect record keepers are now found at the threshold of most houses. They’re nestled inside and out of every commercial building and littered along our highways like signage. Even the dashboard Hula girl has been replaced by a camera. And as the old adage claimed, ‘a picture’s worth a thousand words,’ making nothing more damning than video footage..But by the 2000s, something even more extraordinary upended the world of evidence collection: we all got cellphones. No matter how much misery has been caused by the mobile device, it is undeniably responsible for the largest leap in information collection ever made. We’ve never had more power to record, photograph, and track human beings than we do now, and it’s largely because of this device. Text messages, email, voicemail, GPS tracking, and online content can all be used in a court of law to separate the guilty from the innocent.Remarkably monstrous people seem to love nothing more than to record themselves being bad. Even ordinary jerks can’t seem to resist cataloguing their wrongdoings, making the work of police and the courts theoretically easier than ever. I say theoretically because their jobs have actually never been harder, but that’s an article for another day. Right now, what needs to be understood is this: it isn’t a lack of evidence that prevents conviction or even justice, it’s ideology.The old argument is that one innocent life is worth ten guilty. But let’s face it, we’re not putting innocent people to death anymore — assuming we ever were. With so much irrefutable data, the chance of executing the wrong person has become far-fetched. So, if vigorous requirements for the death penalty are all that’s needed to bring it back — do it. Make DNA evidence, fingerprints, and video footage a requirement for all death sentences, but let’s stop pretending the ‘wrong person’ is going to suffer the consequences.Unfortunately, practical arguments don’t work with the Left. Their whole armoury of control is based on ethical superiority combined with a profound compassion that those who don’t align with their agenda are simply missing. In essence, we’re the problem — not criminals. If we could just stop our vengeful ways and embrace rehabilitation, rapists and murderers could live out their lives happily among us — and thanks to the Liberals — they do..But is this really their take on compassion? Allowing victims and their families to suffer with the knowledge that no notable sign of justice was ever carried out? What about the communities and future victims now waiting to be destroyed or devastated by these people — is compassion shown to them? For every murderer shown leniency, how many dozens, or hundreds, of others will pay the price? Let’s take it a step further, how many more criminals did we create?Shahbaz Ahmed wasn’t deterred from brutally beating a Calgary woman a couple weeks ago. Despite two charges of assault with a weapon behind him, he had no issues carrying out another violent attack. Skye Atoa wasn’t discouraged either. After being charged with trafficking minors in Lethbridge, he walked out of the police station and tried his luck again only 30 minutes later.Creating a safe haven for crime has never helped anyone, and sadly mental illness has become a first-class ticket to freedom. Who could ever forget Vince Weiguang Li, the Greyhound bus decapitator, who sawed off a fellow passenger’s head and then disembowel him when he said he heard voices? He was released without monitoring in 2017, as he was no longer deemed an immediate threat to society. And what about Michael Adenyi, who stabbed a fitness instructor to death in downtown Calgary as she made her way to work? He swore he saw monsters and was only trying to defend himself.Since both men are schizophrenic, society is apparently supposed to shrug while their families are left reeling. That needs to stop. The moment a mental illness becomes someone else’s loss of life, sympathy must end and the law must begin. Seeking medical support is something to be pursued before butchering human beings, not after. Make no mistake, our soft-on-crime approach has created criminals, and these men are just a drop in the bucket..Words like ‘rehabilitation’ no longer have meaning, having become synonymous with ‘we give up’ rather than, ‘he’s cured.’ If it wasn’t, police wouldn’t have to plaster neighbourhoods with posters of future resident pedophiles, complete with warnings like ‘high risk sex offender.’ It’s clear in a statement like that, no one is under any illusion that these people have been rehabilitated — so why let them go? Why put someone like that back into society after what they’ve done, especially when it’s clear they’re going to do it again?It's time we stop playing around with criminals and treating them like misunderstood children who lost their way. These are the dregs of society, people hardwired to undo all that is good in our communities and we owe them nothing — not our compassion, our tolerance, our forgiveness or even our prisons.No one said doing the right thing is easy, but it is what needs to be done to restore faith in our institutions, protect our neighbourhoods, and bring closure to victims’ families. Sometimes choosing life means death — that’s not vengeance — that’s justice.R.T. Wells is a veteran of the Royal Canadian Navy.
