My crimes
By Pierre Lemieux
Instead of telling you about my paper crimes, I will confess some real ones. My purpose is to illustrate the importance of legal safeguards, especially the presumption of innocence and the burden of proof. These safeguards have been much undermined over the last few decades, under both the Liberals and the Conservatives.
It has been noted that the presumption of innocence is largely a fiction. If a suspect was really presumed innocent, he would not be arrested or obliged to attend his trial. Moreover, and even if legal theories have been developed to prove the contrary, regulatory offences are inconsistent with the presumption of innocence. The game warden who asks for your hunter’s licence presumes that you are guilty, otherwise he would not ask anything, or you could just ignore him. The border cop whose dog sniffs you luggage does not think you are innocent. This approach of requesting an individual to show that he is innocent has been extended to many areas of life.
In practice, the presumption of innocence coalesces into the burden of proof — the obligation for the government to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt — and other rights of the defence. Indeed, it is by reversing the burden of proof — in civil forfeiture, for example — and otherwise limiting the rights of the defence that the state now undermines the presumption of innocence.
Legal safeguards are important because it can easily happen that somebody looks obviously guilty while he is innocent. This is what three little anecdotes of mine illustrate.
In early November of 1996, my youngest son and I were at a hunting lodge in the middle of nowhere. On our first morning, half an hour before sunrise as the law allows, we were stalking deer with our guns ready. But the sun wasn’t rising as it was supposed to. As the evidence accumulated that there was going to be no sunrise, we had to admit that my watch must have been wrong. “Give me the flashlight!” I said to Jacques-Alexis. It was 7:00 AM, but at GMT+1, that is, at Paris time; in our Québec forest, it was 1:00 AM.
During this epoch, I was spending much time in Paris, and my watch was on both time zones. Its alarm clock was on the wrong one. Had we been caught hunting illegally at night, imagine us trying to prove our innocence!
If you believe that hunting at night is not a real crime, here are some unquestionably real ones.
The second anecdote brings us back to the 1980s when Eaton’s still had a big store in downtown Montréal. I was pushing a cart with a few items I had just purchased. Like an absent-minded professor, I started walking out of the store without thinking of paying. A security guard stopped me. I made a gesture of the sort, “Gosh, I have forgotten to pay!”. The guard frowned severely and showed me the direction of the nearest cash register. Nothing else happened.
This happened at about the time Claude Charron, a Parti Québécois Minister, was caught with stolen clothes in the same store, arrested, and later convicted. I must have looked more honest than him. One advantage of being honest is that one looks honest. Still, had the guard arrested me and the cops laid charges, would my absent-mindedness have been a persuasive defence?
The last anecdote happened just a few weeks ago, on March 29. A friend had asked me to install some drapes, and I needed hooks for the pole. We drove to the huge IKEA store in Saint-Laurent, now part of Montréal (picture above). We bought two packs of hooks. But it is difficult to be in an IKEA without buying something else! We finally took our big cart through the cash register lines and, after paying, carried it out of the store. When we passed the door, the theft alarm beeped. I said something deep like, “If we beep, we beep”. Nobody chased us, and we walked to my car through the humongous parking lot.
There, putting my hand in my pocket to get my car keys, I found a third pack of hooks — the one that had beeped! I have no idea how it got there but, obviously, while choosing the hooks and looking at other things at the same time, I had mistakenly put my hand in my pocket with a pack of hooks in it. Try explaining that to the cops!
I walked back to the store where, I must confess, I cheated a bit: I jumped a queue at customer service in order to return the “stolen” hooks.
The obvious criminal, then, is not necessarily a real one. Better leave the burden of proof to the Crown. And better not to have too many cops watching honest citizens.
(May 10, 2008)
