tangents

news & views

by dal mcintire

A royal commission has urged sweeping changes in Canadian sex laws, aiming at standardization of conflicting, ineffective, ill-defined statutes, and untrammeled powers for the state to deal with "sex crimes." The group, headed by Chief Justice McRuer of Ontario's High Court, recommended, after 4yr's study, that sex laws be stiffened considerably, and federal provisions be made to cure sex offenders -or preventive detention at least, since the commission admitted little (read "nothing") is known about curing sex criminals.

Recomendations: all persons found by courts to be "dangerous sexual offenders" (i.e., "a person who, by his conduct in sexual matters, has shown a failure to control his sexual impulses and who is likely to cause injury, pain or other evil to any person through the failure in the future to control his sexual impulses") should be sentenced to indeterminate penitentiary terms (present average sentence: 2 yrs.).

Courts, they said, should require "a standard of proof no higher than balance of probability" (Good enough for any communazi legal system) to convict a person as a dangerous sexual offender. This complete travesty of due process and scuttling of personal rights in

defiance of longstanding laws of evidence would "afford greater protection to society" they said, and would "impose no injustice on the prisoner."

Deploring the fact that a 1948 indeterminate-prison-sentence law had netted only 23 convictions in 7 years, the commission demanded looser definition of what constitutes a "dangerous sexual offender," and radical break with former principles of legal justice such as to force defendants to prove their innocence of vague, nebulous charges.

Recommendation: government should set up guinea pig clinics to treat sexual offenders (commission said castration is no help-may even have dangerous consequences).

Except where criminal attack is involved, conviction for homosexual acts between adult males does not warrant such indeterminate sentences, tho acts with minors would be dealt with more severely than

now.

THE GUARDIANS

New York's topcop, on the pretext of curbing juvenile gangs (Gotham's teenage gangs have always been a terror) has been demanding extraordinary powers for his 23,000 cops. But who is to guard the guardians? One 26-yr-old cop arraigned

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