Two Ontario mothers whose teenage daughters were the victims of violent crimes – one was raped and the other killed by a drunk driver – are outraged over their treatment by a supposedly victim-friendly federal bureaucracy. Corrections Canada refuses to allow the women to visit the prisons where the perpetrators are incarcerated until it drafts a national policy on the issue. Victims have routinely been allowed to tour penitentiaries across the country for more than a decade.
Rarely have I seen surprising new information in the written record of a parole hearing I have attended, but it’s there in the internal document (read it after the jump) for paroled former pro hockey player Rob Ramage (inset). The onetime captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs recently won release to a halfway house after a hearing held at the Kingston, Ontario prison where’s serving his four-year prison sentence for driving drunk and killing a friend. The four-page parole document reveals that Ramage had a driving-related brush with the law while he was free on bail.
Imprisoned former Toronto Maple Leaf captain Rob Ramage (inset) has been paroled to a halfway house in London, Ontario, after 10 months behind bars and despite insisting he does not remember getting drunk the day he killed his close friend. “We feel that the risk is manageable on this type of release,” parole board member Bruce Malcolm said, after a three-hour hearing that I attended May 5 at Frontenac Institution.
Imprisoned former NHL defenceman Rob Ramage was granted partial freedom at a parole hearing Friday. A two-member panel of the Parole Board of Canada granted Ramage’s request for unescorted passes. He will be able to leave Frontenac Institution, the minimum-security prison in Kingston, Ontario, where he is serving his four-year sentence, without an escort. “That would be for up to 72 hours a month,” said Carol Sparling, a spokeswoman for the board in Kingston.
Former NHL player Rob Ramage (inset) is likely to be paroled today, eight months after he began serving a four-year prison sentence. The one-time captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs went to prison in July last year after he lost an appeal of his conviction for driving drunk and crashing his car, killing his passenger and friend, former Chicago Blackhawks star defenceman Keith Magnuson.
The man accused of plowing a car into a minivan at 200 kilometres per hour in Toronto, killing three people, dodged jail time two years ago in Kingston when he was convicted of rigging a Scotiabank ATM with devices that steal personal data and PIN numbers from customers.
“I don’t care if anyone is dead,” Scott said, as he was pried from the wreck of the stolen car he had just plowed into another car, killing four people, including three children. He was unlicensed and his blood-alcohol level was double the legal limit.
If a man who represents himself has a fool for a client, and a fool for a lawyer (as the old saying goes), how about a man whose mommy is his lawyer?
The Ontario government apparently believes it has overcome computer kinks holding up a much-ballyhooed crackdown on near drunk drivers. A senior government official recently distributed an internal document [read it after the jump] to police forces across the province explaining how suspensions will be recorded on driver records. It means roadside information from police has to quickly and accurately get into computers at the Ministry of Transportation, where driver records are kept. That might not be so easy, given that this is a ministry that has, in the past, given new drivers licences to killer drunk drivers who’ve been banned from driving for life.
Tim Mulcahy (pictured with son Tyler), the Toronto businessman whose son and two friends died in a drunk driving crash in central Ontario issued a statement today, saying he’s not suing the golf course that served his son and friends a boatload of alcohol. He also seems to want to distance himself from what Cancrime has called the ’show prosecution’ of the club [previous post].
I have not personally taken any action against the Lake Joseph Club, and have had no dialogue with the OPP or AGCO, with the exception of being informed of Tyler’s death several hours after it occurred by a Bracebridge OPP officer.
Mulcahy may be feeling the heat. There may be whispers that the golf club was charged with liquor law violations only because of a grieving father’s vociferous public campaign. Mulcahy, a successful businessman and sales guru, went on a PR blitz that included full-page newspaper ads in Toronto papers addressed to Premier Dalton McGuinty. He humiliated the Ontario government, making the Liberals look feeble when it comes to licensing young drivers and enforcing liquor laws. Many of those laws are rarely enforced to full effect, so there’s reason for cynicism about this crackdown. It will be interesting to see if there are more prosecutions in Ontario of booze servers in the wake of fatal crashes – or only in cases where there are vocal families with the means to fund ad campaigns.
Because someone has to say it: It seems a bit strange that on Tim Mulcahy’s blog about his campaign for tougher laws governing young drivers and alcohol, he has included links to three business ventures.
Video of the Shafia family, who have since been convicted of murdering four family members, as they arrived in court in October 2010, when their case was at the pre-trial motion stage. (click image above to play video)
Managers at medium-security Joyceville penitentiary in Kingston, Ontario, bowed to a long list of inmate demands, including giving back control of spaces in the volatile prison where a race riot last year left one inmate near death (click image above to read the internal memo obtained by Cancrime). Management aceded to the demands of the inmates after they staged a one-week strike in which convicts refused to report to their prison jobs.
»Click here to read full post about last year's riot at Joyceville
»Click here to read about Josh Erdodi, the inmate who was savagely beaten during the riot
