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blackice
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Canada where else...
Sep 2000
time: 00:17
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The Ottawa Citizen
Wednesday, March 13, 2002
"Couple stymied by presumption of guilt in domestic violence cases"
By Dave Brown
Because a restraining order won't allow them to communicate directly, an Ottawa couple came up with a novel approach. They have asked this column to be something of an emergency message board on which they can leave notes for each other.
More precisely, they asked me to be their telephone go-between.
At the same time, they hope to show how overpowering are the warriors in the war against violence towards women.
They've been threatened and both are frightened. They ask for anonymity but have given me permission to identify them to editors should there be any doubters. They are angry and want others to know what they're going through They think all couples should be prepared to face the consequences of asking for help through a system operating on zero tolerance.
They say they will not bend to system pressure that would see him branded with a criminal record for assault. I'm betting they'll lose that one. If they don't they could lose their marriage and/or their home. They've been told they can talk to each other and he can go home only after he voluntarily submits to a plea of guilty and a commitment to attend anger management courses.
In the beginning: She called the general Ottawa police number, not the emergency number. "I was frightened and I wanted advice.''
She says she believes his aberrant behaviour was caused by a change in medication. She didn't before think of him as a problem drinker but when he mixed alcohol with the new meds the results were behaviours she hadn't seen before. "I think he thought he was Jean-Claude Van Damme. He had watched one of those action movies, then he started acting like that. I wanted to know what to do and if I was at risk. I was frightened when I called and we soon had half a dozen officers at the house, hands on their guns, going into the room where my husband was."
He says he has no memory of the incident. He regained his senses at the police station and people wouldn't talk to him. For a long time he thought he had murdered his wife or harmed his children. Then he was turned loose with a restraining order. Any attempt to go near his home or communicate with his wife, he was warned, would result in his arrest.
She was told if she allowed communication she could lose her children. Some would consider her refusal to keep him at a safe distance a clear indicator she was willing to put her children at risk. Authorities could take them into protective custody.
He wanted a message passed along to her that after two weeks he had overstayed his welcome at a male friend's bachelor apartment and had moved out. He had an offer of a bed from a woman friend. Ask (wife) if it would be all right with her.
"Tell him if he does that it's over! I don't want my husband spending nights alone with another woman.''
After Sunday night's windstorm she wanted to know where he had spent the night. He said he had been unable to find an opening at a men's shelter so he spent the night huddled in a parking garage. She said she believed him. "If that's what he said, that's what he did. He doesn't lie. This is crazy. This has to stop.''
The guilty plea could end it. He said he was ready to do that. He can't afford to stay in a hotel and hasn't been able to find anybody willing to provide free shelter. He said he was told by a lawyer he could have the restraining order lifted and be back home next week. That would likely mean a guilty plea.
"No way,'' says wife. "We'll fight this. It's crazy.''
My guess? It's the mortgage payments that will make the decision. She's a stay-at-home mom and without his full income, they can't get by. "I want to get in front of a judge and explain,'' she says.
There are others wanting the same thing, and some say they can't get into court until September. The court delay is a pressure tactic that inflates abuse statistics, backing demands for more funding. There's no presumption of innocence in domestic violence courts.
"I believe there are abused women who need help,'' she says. "But how do you prove you're not one? These people (Crown prosecutors) won't listen. Families are involved here. Our lives can be ruined. There has to be a fast track.''
*Dave Brown is the Citizen's senior editor. Send e-mail to dbrown@thecitizen.southam.ca Read previous columns at www.ottawacitizen.com .
© Copyright 2002 The Ottawa Citizen
Copyright © 2002 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest Global Communications Corp.
All rights reserved. Copyright terms & conditions
Optimized for browser versions 4.0 and higher.
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blackice
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Canada where else...
Sep 2000
time: 00:17
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quote:
The Ottawa Citizen
Wednesday, March 13, 2002
"Couple stymied by presumption of guilt in domestic violence cases"
By Dave Brown
Because a restraining order won't allow them to communicate directly, an Ottawa couple came up with a novel approach. They have asked this column to be something of an emergency message board on which they can leave notes for each other.
More precisely, they asked me to be their telephone go-between.
At the same time, they hope to show how overpowering are the warriors in the war against violence towards women.
They've been threatened and both are frightened. They ask for anonymity but have given me permission to identify them to editors should there be any doubters. They are angry and want others to know what they're going through They think all couples should be prepared to face the consequences of asking for help through a system operating on zero tolerance.
They say they will not bend to system pressure that would see him branded with a criminal record for assault. I'm betting they'll lose that one. If they don't they could lose their marriage and/or their home. They've been told they can talk to each other and he can go home only after he voluntarily submits to a plea of guilty and a commitment to attend anger management courses.
In the beginning: She called the general Ottawa police number, not the emergency number. "I was frightened and I wanted advice.''
She says she believes his aberrant behaviour was caused by a change in medication. She didn't before think of him as a problem drinker but when he mixed alcohol with the new meds the results were behaviours she hadn't seen before. "I think he thought he was Jean-Claude Van Damme. He had watched one of those action movies, then he started acting like that. I wanted to know what to do and if I was at risk. I was frightened when I called and we soon had half a dozen officers at the house, hands on their guns, going into the room where my husband was."
He says he has no memory of the incident. He regained his senses at the police station and people wouldn't talk to him. For a long time he thought he had murdered his wife or harmed his children. Then he was turned loose with a restraining order. Any attempt to go near his home or communicate with his wife, he was warned, would result in his arrest.
She was told if she allowed communication she could lose her children. Some would consider her refusal to keep him at a safe distance a clear indicator she was willing to put her children at risk. Authorities could take them into protective custody.
He wanted a message passed along to her that after two weeks he had overstayed his welcome at a male friend's bachelor apartment and had moved out. He had an offer of a bed from a woman friend. Ask (wife) if it would be all right with her.
"Tell him if he does that it's over! I don't want my husband spending nights alone with another woman.''
After Sunday night's windstorm she wanted to know where he had spent the night. He said he had been unable to find an opening at a men's shelter so he spent the night huddled in a parking garage. She said she believed him. "If that's what he said, that's what he did. He doesn't lie. This is crazy. This has to stop.''
The guilty plea could end it. He said he was ready to do that. He can't afford to stay in a hotel and hasn't been able to find anybody willing to provide free shelter. He said he was told by a lawyer he could have the restraining order lifted and be back home next week. That would likely mean a guilty plea.
"No way,'' says wife. "We'll fight this. It's crazy.''
My guess? It's the mortgage payments that will make the decision. She's a stay-at-home mom and without his full income, they can't get by. "I want to get in front of a judge and explain,'' she says.
There are others wanting the same thing, and some say they can't get into court until September. The court delay is a pressure tactic that inflates abuse statistics, backing demands for more funding. There's no presumption of innocence in domestic violence courts.
"I believe there are abused women who need help,'' she says. "But how do you prove you're not one? These people (Crown prosecutors) won't listen. Families are involved here. Our lives can be ruined. There has to be a fast track.''
*Dave Brown is the Citizen's senior editor. Send e-mail to dbrown@thecitizen.southam.ca Read previous columns at www.ottawacitizen.com .
© Copyright 2002 The Ottawa Citizen
Copyright © 2002 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest Global Communications Corp.
All rights reserved. Copyright terms & conditions
Optimized for browser versions 4.0 and higher. |
Yup makes total sense to me  Amazing he sure has a voice here, more ironic is she doesn't either
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blackice
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Canada where else...
Sep 2000
time: 00:17
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quote:
The Ottawa Citizen
Saturday, March 16, 2002
"The booming return of debtors' prisons"
By Dave Brown
Debtors' prisons are back in fashion in Ontario and the pleas for help
landing on this desk are increasing.
These are men who are charged with no crime, convicted of no crime, but are
being jailed. It happens at "default hearings" in which they are called on
to explain themselves. Why have they allowed their court-ordered child
support payments to fall into arrears?
An Ottawa Valley man who admits he's in arrears in his support payments to
his first family says he tried to make his case to Family Responsibility
Office (FRO) enforcers in Toronto but didn't find sympathy or understanding.
His driver's license was revoked causing a serious reduction in his income.
He's remarried with three children to support. If he goes to jail taxpayers
will support his new family indefinitely on welfare. He wants to know who
wins.
A Kitchener man faces a family court judge at a default hearing next week
and says his reason for not paying is that he went through a divorce in the
Maritimes and when his ex moved to Kitchener with the children, he followed
to maintain contact with his kids. He was unable to find employment to match
the level he had been earning when support payments were set. As he fell
behind, pressure from FRO increased and he had to forfeit his passport and
driving permit.
A Toronto man, a self-employed consultant, went to a default hearing with
his financial records and no lawyer. He wanted to show how the economic
downturn made it impossible to meet the level of payments set when he was
riding high. The judge had him arrested on the spot and hauled off to a
90-day stretch.
He says it was an odd experience, being a non-convict in a prison. Since he
wasn't convicted of anything he didn't have the same rights as a convict,
such as work assignments to help kill the boredom.
This booming return to debtor's prison has happened quietly. It's a response
to zero tolerance and the knee-jerk reaction that any man who isn't meeting
court-ordered support is a deadbeat. Every one of them is different and in
different circumstances, but once pegged with that description, they're
prison-bait.
For the best look at how this system got rolling and how it's operating, we
go back to February 2000 when it was explained at a hearing at Queen's Park
The speaker was Andromache Karakatsanis, deputy attorney general, and one of
the most powerful bureaucrats in the province. She praised the work of the
FRO as one of the most aggressive enforcement forces in Canada, "and we are
constantly making improvements."
That was the same FRO that MP Peter Kormos and friends raided and found
chaos, including 90,000 pieces of "unfinished business" and unopened
correspondence lying around. He would later shout in the legislature that
FRO was "non-functioning, in total disarray, total chaos, and it's no wonder
that women and children aren't getting their money." The agency was moved
from under the control of community and social services to attorney general.
Back to Ms. Karakatsanis.
She boasted to the assembled politicos that FRO was now fixed. It had by
then adopted a new approach to default hearings. "Too often in the past FRO
acted only when somebody complained." A man and woman can no longer discuss
and adjust their situations. They have become state-run ex-families.
She reported FRO had seized 5,200 driving permits but gave no indication how
many of those men lost all ability to pay because of that.
Then she dropped in the business about using default hearings to send men to
prison. Men would be sent to jail through non-criminal courts for unpaid
debts. According to those who sat in, not a single elected eyebrow was
raised.
That may change when they realize they are building a sizeable constituency
of angry voters. There are currently 130,000 men in the province designated
as deadbeats. They range from a minority of determined refusers to men who
are in arrears because of job loss or can't meet the standards set by
courts, which are now using "imputed" incomes. (The amount the man should be
earning if he made more effort.)
Searching for an answer to how many men are going to prison as debtors, not
convicts, a formal inquiry was fed into the attorney general's department.
The answer came from Sharon van Son, director of FRO.
"FRO issues on average 100 new default notices per week, and attends an
average of 350 court matters per week. We do not keep official statistics on
how many go to jail, but we believe this figure to be approximately 10 per
month."
Scared yet? A government agency is feeding debtors into the prison system
and not keeping a head count. It's going to get worse.
FRO has 11 lawyers of its own and contracts out to another 117. It operates
out of an unmarked building north of the 401 and doesn't give its address.
If you don't hear jackboots you're not paying attention. They're coming to
get you -- or somebody you know.
*Dave Brown is the Citizen's senior editor. E-mail to
dbrown@thecitizen.southam.ca Read previous columns at www.ottawacitizen.com
© Copyright 2002 The Ottawa Citizen
Copyright © 2002 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest Global
Communications Corp.
All rights reserved. Copyright terms & conditions |
So tell me all you lawyer types how legally do we go from civil law to criminal law in one fell swoop. Then tell me the logic of this assinine situation... misandry..less than 5% are dead beat dads the rest are in jail do the kids win or is this just hate crimes?
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blackice
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Canada where else...
Sep 2000
time: 00:17
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quote:
Globe and Mail, Tuesday, March 19, 2002 - Page A20
Bailing out Vera and learning some new lessons
The longer I knew Vera, the more I learned about how different life is when
you don't have a car or money in the bank or a network of friends and
family.
By CECELIA KENNEDY
The woman I'll call Vera is a new immigrant and a single mother. Her family
fell apart when she was arrested for assaulting her 19-year-old daughter. I
am Canadian born, also a mother, and I, too, have a 19-year-old daughter.
When I met Vera we discovered that our daughters, born on opposite sides of
the world, had arrived within days of each other. That coincidence soon
began to seem the only similarity we shared. Her tiny basement apartment,
shared by mother and three daughters, was only a short walk from my
comfortable suburban house. But the distance between us couldn't have been
greater. The longer I knew Vera, the more I learned about how different life
is when you don't have a car or money in the bank or a network of friends
and family.
I learned some of those lessons while helping her register and outfit the
children for school, finding a retraining program that would make her
employable or catch a ride home from the food bank. Her cries for help were
frequent and frequently annoying.
But my real schooling began when Vera called me from the Toronto's Metro
West Detention Centre. Her voice shook with distress against a background of
shouting women as she said, "I'm in jail. Can you bail me out of jail?"
She'd been charged with assault after an argument with Irene, her
19-year-old daughter. According to Vera, Irene had come home drunk in the
middle of a Saturday morning, too late to baby-sit so that her mother could
get to her part-time job. Mother tried to lay down the law of household
responsibilities. Daughter ran to the police station and complained of being
beaten.
I never did untangle the truth of what had happened. Had a young girl
figured out what you need to say to the Canadian police in order to get your
mother off your back? Had Vera, in the heat of argument, hit her daughter? I
would never know.
Arrested on the weekend, Vera spent two nights in custody waiting for a
Monday bail hearing. To get out of jail and home to her two younger
children, she desperately needed a surety, someone who would be willing to
supervise her while waiting for her trial, and prove that willingness by
putting name and, potentially, money on the line. So off I went to the
courthouse to see what might be done.
My education in the justice system began that day. The first lesson I
learned was that if you are going to get arrested it is much better to
arrange it for mid-week. That way you don't have to wait days for a bail
hearing. The weekend backlog of arrests was so deep that Vera didn't step
into the prisoner's box until late in the afternoon. With the docket so
crowded her case was simply held over to the next day. Back she went to
Metro West.
Tuesday's lessons, drummed into me while I watched one drunk driver, bar
fighter and shoplifter after another come before the Justice of the Peace,
was that when you are in trouble it is family and old friends who will come
to your aid. Vera, new to our country, had no one. No one but the most
recent acquaintances, tenuous connections like mine forged in a church
hallway or at a school bus stop.
I also learned that even if you are willing to help, you might not pass the
audition.
"You haven't known her long enough," said the duty counsel, the lawyer whose
job it is to represent the prisoner. He refused even to propose me as a
surety and once more Vera went back to jail.
By Wednesday she had been in custody for five days. It had started to look
like that's where she would stay. I'd spent futile hours sitting on the hard
courthouse benches and seriously considered retreating to my safe world of
malls and minivans. But, in spite of the charge, I had seen Vera running
from pillar to post to get food for her kids, heard her worry about their
math homework, watched her pin huge bows in their hair so they'd go out into
the world looking their best. I decided to give bailing Vera one last try.
And Wednesday's first lesson was that every duty counsel is different.
Fortune offered up a lawyer who listened carefully and looked doubtful, but
agreed to give it a shot. The second was that at the end of the day the
court, desperate to move cases through, becomes more receptive and
definitely more flexible. Late that afternoon, with a few whispered
conversations between Crown and duty counsel, what had been impossible for
days suddenly became an uncontested bail. Vera was free to go. I became, on
paper at least, her keeper.
After five nights at Metro West, Vera came out wearing the same clothes
she'd been arrested in. I had to meet her with the news that her younger
children had been taken into care by the Children's Aid Society. After all,
their mother had been charged with a violent crime. Her trial was scheduled
for nine months hence. If acquitted she might, might, get her children back.
They were a long nine months. The children stayed in foster care. Because of
the days she'd missed, Vera lost her job, then her apartment. When the court
date finally arrived her daughter, who had moved a thousand miles across the
country, declined to return to testify at the trial. All the charges against
Vera were dropped. I suppose that was the last lesson; how a life can be
turned inside out by an accusation never proved.
I'm still living in my comfortable house. Vera is still looking for work,
still trying to get her children back.
Cecelia Kennedy lives in Brampton, Ont. |
Yes she had her day(s) in court...now how long do you think if ever she will get her kids back, her life...crime and punishment or punishment and er what crime?
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Lung
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of my princess Anastasia!
Mar 1999
time: 15:17
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quote:
Originally posted by blackice
THE LITIGATION TRADITION
For Canadians born in 1960, the likelihood of divorce is 33 percent. For those born in 1970, the likelihood is 40 percent (Statistics Canada). Over three-quarters of Canadians are married. Many more are involved in common-law relationships which give rise to legal rights and obligations. So the chances of encountering the judicial system on relationship breakdown are high.
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Hi, dude! I must say i prefer your witty repartee' on the CTP Multiplaying board than the agonised individual you appear as here on the OT forum.
Anyway, i just wanted to comment on this particular item, as it has recently hit the great southern land, resulting in sudden and righteously loud outrage. Strangley, it wasn't until insurance premiums started soaring at increases of thousands of percent  that people started to complain. Suddenly we have our state premier calling for a specific exception to legislation allowing ANZAC day parades to go ahead without mandatorily having enourmous sums for liability insurance!! It is the ultimate farce, that public events are jeopardised from occurring so dickhead lawyers can make heaps of money.
Fortunately however, most people have enough common sense to see how stupid this is, and are speaking out against it. I hope we ultimately have a victory for common sense and force the lawyers back under the rocks from whence they came. 
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Jack_www
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In the world today there many people sufer injustice. Men and woman of all ages all over the world. One thing though that this world is a man's world. I will not dispute the fact that there many be many woman who lie to try and get back at their husban or ex boyfriend and try to get sole custody of any children they have. But if you look at the larger picture, this does not happen to most men and for more often women are discriminated against in many areas of life, and have been for all of human history.
I have a hard time believing that a restraining order can be put on someone when the person who is protected by it does not want it. I dont really know anything about Canadian Law, as i live in the United States, but where I live a person must go to court and apply for a restraining order, and usually first a temporary one is put into place than in a week after the person who is aftected by the restraining order is notified a court hearing is held and both sides present their case. The police cannot issue a restraining order against anyone. So please explain to me how restraining orders work in Canadia.
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09-03-2002 22:50
It has was and has been unreal. She is extremely happy as we all are. On to a normal life (I hope) 
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