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Kevin Engstrom
Winnipeg Sun
Canadians are understandably outraged over the laughably light sentence given to a child molester, said Kevin Engstrom. But we shouldn’t be surprised. Graham James, a former junior league hockey coach, was sentenced last week to just two years in prison for molesting former NHL star Theoren Fleury and his cousin during the 1980s. In pronouncing the sentence, the judge, Catherine Carlson, argued that James had endured great “public humiliation” over the years. He was first convicted of sexually abusing two other players in the 1990s, and served only 18 months in prison before being granted a federal pardon so he could live out his days in sunny Spain and Mexico. He was tried again after Fleury came forward last year. In Carlson’s view, apparently, poor James has “already suffered enough.” This is the problem with the Canadian justice system. It has been eviscerated by “liberal judges and hug-a-thug politicians” who care more about coddling perpetrators than about getting justice for their victims. We can only hope that this injustice forces lawmakers to toughen up. “If the national outrage over this case has proved anything, it’s that there’s definitely an appetite for more to be done.”
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