Errant Justice

What can Corrections Canada be thinking?  It defies logic and insults the very concept of valuing justice and deploring the loss of human life that two convicted murderers would enjoy connubial relations while imprisoned for murderous assaults against other human beings.  All the more so when the woman of the pair killed a child in jealous rage, determined to make the man who spurned her suffer.

Amina Chaudhary must have been delighted when a two-person panel in Kitchener, Ontario decided to grant her day parole.  On the other hand, prison authorities had already granted her some very special privileges previously.  She had been found guilty of first-degree murder in 1982.  Having decided to kill her ex-lover's eight-year-old nephew in revenge for the man having returned to India to be married.

She strangled the child to demonstrate her anger that she was being left, while the uncle of the child fulfilled his obligation in an arranged marriage to another woman.  In 2005 she was released to a halfway house.  She had married another prisoner, and had been permitted to spend most nights with her husband, at home.  Her husband was also convicted of murder, and he was on full parole at the time.

While she was still serving her life sentence she gave birth to three children through her marriage to her husband, another prison inmate.  If a woman - let alone the man who was the father of these three children -  capable of strangling a child was comfortable bringing children into this world knowing that they would have two murderers as parents, that's one thing.  How could prison authorities countenance that?

She was brought back into custody two years ago as a result of allegations of financial "discrepancies" in real estate deals.  The panel which released her to day parole insisted she must continue to seek psychological counselling.  Presumably, the three children would have been taken from the custody of their parents, into public care. 

This woman is not a Canadian citizen.  She has cost the country dearly in incarceration and in medical and counselling services.  Those costs accelerated with the birth of three children and their care.  She continues to tie up the legal system through fighting the conviction of murder of that eight-year-old child, despite having been found guilty of a planned murder (first-degree). 

She has been ordered deported from Canada because of her criminality and her landed immigrant status.  But she is fighting the deportation order.  Is any of this logical and sane on the part of government and its agencies?  This woman whose criminal offences are beyond the pale can call upon the protection of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to battle a deportation order, tying up our court system.

None of this reflects common sense.