Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Crown wimps out - No Dangerous Offender Status for Whitmore



Last summer, After a week-long manhunt and 10 hour standoff, police captured a long-term habitual pedophile with two boys he'd abducted.
They caught him with the boys.
In the Act.
Well, kidnapping if not actually buggering them. They've got the boys testimony of the way he abducted them, threatened their lives, confined them unlawfully, and raped them.

So why the hell did crown prosecutor Anthony Gerein accept a plea-bargain that keeps Pedophile Peter Whitmore from being declared a dangerous offender?

That's right. Whitmore struck a deal so that in exchange for pleading guilty, he'll get a so-called Life Sentence and a chance for parole after 7 years... -and no Dangerous Offender Designation.

Who screwed up? What's wrong with the evidence? Is Gerein just incompetent, or does he actually believe his pollyannish statement to the press that Whitmore's life sentence "essentially achieves the same goal"??!!!????
Every junior high social studies student knows that a Canadian "life sentence" is NEVER that long, and that the dangerous offender status was introduced in part because of that.

A news story on CTV's website has a list of Whitmore's past history of repeat offenses:

For his sex crimes against five boys, aged 11 to 13, he was sentenced to 16 months in addition to six months' time served, and three years probation. He was released on July 29, 1994, after serving two-thirds of his sentence, with strict orders to avoid contact with children under 14.

Within nine days, he was on the prowl again, this time in Guelph, Ont., where he posed as a worker in child protective services and managed to trick a mother into turning over her eight-year-old girl. He took her to Toronto, where he forced her to perform sexual acts on him before sending her home in a taxi.

Another victim was a boy, 9, who lived next door to Whitmore in Keswick, Ont., and was talked into a sleepover. "(The victim) would say no or stop, it would stop, but then Peter Whitmore would offer money and ask to do it again,'' the court document states. "That occurred a few times over the course of the one night in question.''

For those two crimes, invitation to sexual touching and sexual interference, Whitmore was sentenced to 56 months in prison and prohibited from contact with young children.

Even his cellmate at Millhaven Institution, near Kingston, Ont., was disturbed by some of Whitmore's behaviour.

"I know he needs help,'' reported the inmate. "He would stand six inches from TV and stare at kids. He would even touch the screen where the kid's private parts were. I remember one time when he told me that women were nothing but trouble.''

Back then, he'd admitted to prison psychologist Bruce Malcolm that he'd had 10 or 11 "what he considered 'relationships' with boys mainly under the age of 12.'' He didn't co-operate with treatment programs in any serious way. Malcolm found Whitmore a high risk to reoffend.


Hear that Gerein? "A High Risk to Reoffend."

Whitmore's lawyer, Merv Shaw, said that Whitmore would have a glimmer of hope "he might get out."

Apparently this is ok with Crown Prosecutor Gerein.

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