Notorious serial rapist, abuser, and killer Paul Bernardo was denied parole for a third time since 2018 last week, leaving many baffled and outraged over why such a dangerous offender should ever be considered for reintegration into society in the first place.
The premise certainly seems not only outrageous but harmful: how could an apparent psychopath and diagnosed narcissist who stalked, raped, and killed multiple women in cold blood—including the sister of his equally notorious bride Karla Homolka—possibly be released from prison to again walk among us?
And, further, why drag the families of victims away from their long path to recovery and healing by periodically raising the spectre of his release?
As it turned out, the Parole Board of Canada attempted to add insult to injury, initially barring the families of Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy from testifying at Bernardo’s third hearing. The Board, unironically, claimed they would be “unable to ensure the safety and security of all hearing attendees” at the medium-security facility where Bernardo was controversially transferred only last year, implausibly claiming it would be preferable to proceed online, without the families of victims.
Following a legal challenge by the families and common sense political and public outrage, the Board relented and allowed the families a voice in live proceedings.
And their account of the impacts of Bernardo’s atrocities upon their lives was harrowing. The parents of the victims relayed that it had been thousands of days since they had seen their children, and while many of the friends of the victims had gone on to become grandparents, their daughters had not been allowed to even reach the age of motherhood.
Mahaffy’s brother, Ryan, spoke of reliving the trauma of Bernardo’s savagery almost daily, with activities as mundane as mixing up concrete conjuring grim images of Bernardo’s favourite way to dispose of his victim’s—in this case, his sister’s—remains via encasement and sinking. Heartbreakingly, he went on to describe how Bernardo had even stolen his sister’s name. While he wanted to name his daughter after his lost sibling, he feared her peers would later stumble across his sister’s horrific death by Googling their shared name.
Why even ask the question?
According to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, every person in Canada has a right not to be subject to “cruel and unusual treatment or punishment”. The Supreme Court of Canada has recently ruled that having no prospect for release falls within this category, no matter how dangerous the offender in question may be.
But this was not always the case. The Harper government was not at all shy about mandating consecutive life sentences for first-degree murder, such that the 25-year minimum for parole consideration could be multiplied by the number of guilty convictions. Four murders, such as in the tragic example of the deliberate vehicular homicide of a visibly-Muslim family committed in service of white supremacist terror by Nathaniel Veltman in London Ontario in 2021, would have yielded no parole consideration for a century; effectively, no hope for release.
In its ruling, the Supreme Court reasoned that removing any faint hope for release would wipe out any incentive on the part of an inmate to work towards any aspect of rehabilitation—in a sense, damning the soul to purgatory.
As such, life sentences can now only ever be served concurrently, without any summative delay for consideration for parole. Everyone gets their hearing within 25 years, but with no guarantee that any form of community release (i.e., permanent, gradual, or temporary) will be granted.
On every occasion, Bernardo has had his requests shot down, for good reason. At his latest hearing, the Board observed that his clinical assessments remained bleak and his initial crimes horrendous. His hours of testimony last week were certainly unusual, peppered with diagnostical psychological jargon to “rationally” explain his conduct as the product of his own childhood trauma in witnessing his mother’s abuse and enduring his own. The lack of current attachment and responsibility Bernardo either feels or was attempting to portray for his crimes was further heightened by his strange use of the third person in describing the ways in which childhood trauma causes “one” or “you” (but not “I”) to respond through violence.
True to the manner of the inward-looking psychopath, Bernardo’s accelerating patter gave the impression of someone driven by the pleasure of solving the intellectual riddle of explaining abhorrence at the level of abstraction, rather than by any repentance motivated by human empathy or feeling.
What to do with stagnant souls?
Bernardo is the ultimate dangerous offender: a predatory killer who poses, in the view of victim Leslie Mahaffy’s mother Debbie Mahaffy (and, seemingly, Corrections Canada, who did not support any form of community release) an “endless risk to the public.” In Canada, this formal designation of “dangerous offender” carries with it an indefinite life sentence (reviewable every seven years) over the standard life punishment assigned for premeditated or terror-motivated murder. But given that the Supreme Court has ruled that such sentences cannot be consecutive (i.e., summative), the most this supposedly serious designation can achieve is to count as an additional strike against an applicant when they come up for consideration for parole at the 25-year mark.
This is, however, an absurdity. The designation of “dangerous offender” is not easily handed out, and so should either mean something or be dissolved. Dangerous offenders such as Bernardo stretch the “faint hope” for rehabilitation and reintegration beyond all reason—standing before us starkly in the annals of remorseless, stagnant souls such as Robert Picton and Clifford Olsen. Rather than worry about whether it is “cruel and unusual” to give violent criminals no chance of parole, we should instead be concerned about how cruel and unusual these people were towards their innocent victims.
This leaves only difficult policy choices on the table—none of which would likely leave me very popular at the progressive professors’ winter holiday party.
First, the government could go the route of the notwithstanding clause, insisting that all dangerous offenders either serve their full consecutive 25-year terms for all life sentence counts, or, a little more moderately, at minimum have a 25-year “bonus” added to the initial 25 to make 50 years.
Alternatively, to make nice with a Supreme Court that will have an eye of concern out for the rare dangerous offender who is not clinically incapable of empathic insight into the impacts of their crimes on their victims, it could be stipulated that dangerous offenders would be permitted to come forward for parole consideration only once every seven years, after hitting their 25-year mark.
This last approach has the benefit of being reluctant to label souls lost while limiting the revictimization of those who have lost the most at the hands of murderers.
Michael Kempa is a criminologist with the spirit of an investigative journalist. He focuses on exposing the politics behind policing, security and criminal justice operations, policies and reforms. Based out of the University of Ottawa, he has contributed to The Hub, The National Post, CBC, Walrus Magazine, and others. He…...
