Montreal
The democratically elected prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, has rightly drawn global criticism for his lavish praise of brutal dictator Fidel Castro. But there was perhaps even more disturbing news from our neighbor to the north last week.
Melissa Ann Shepard, a Nova Scotia resident, is known locally as the “Internet Black Widow.” In the words of the Canadian Press, she has been convicted of “killing and poisoning intimate partners she met online.” The details of Shepard’s “career” make for harrowing reading:
Nor is that all. Later, Shepard married yet another man, and was found to have spiked his coffee with tranquilizers in 2012 in a failed murder plot.
How was this horrific individual able to sustain such a prolific career of cruelty? Well, it surely helped that her prison sentences were laughably short. She was sentenced to a mere two years in prison after running over her husband twice. That allowed Shepard to run another con in 2005, which saw her convicted of ” three counts of grand theft from a person 65 years or older, two counts of forgery and two counts of using a forged document.” Her sentence? Five years in prison. (Recall, she was convicted of those crimes after already being convicted of manslaughter.)
Which brings us to last week’s news. After Shepard attempted to murder her husband with poisoned coffee, she was sentenced to . . . less than thee years in prison. She has now been released, and the terms of her probation have been announced.
Ideally, a criminal justice system has multiple functions: protecting the public; rehabilitating the convicted; and, yes, punishing those who deserve it. (Within reason, of course.) Canada, it would seem, has in this case at least drifted a bit too far into a merely utilitarian view of things: Punishment doesn’t even seem to be a consideration at all. The only thing that matters is preventing Shepard from killing again—hence the restrictions on her changing her appearance.
But in its zeal to avoid issuing punitive punishments, the Canadian justice system also manifestly failed to protect its citizens from Melissa Ann Shepard.
