A book of condolence is signed at the Codiac RCMP detachment in Moncton, N.B., on June 6, 2014, to pay respect to the three RCMP officers who were killed and the two injured in a shooting spree. Justin Bourque, who fatally shot the three Mounties, will be eligible for full parole just over 16 years from now.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Justin Bourque, who shot and killed three Mounties in Moncton in 2014, will be eligible for full parole just over 16 years from now, and day parole in 13 years, after the New Brunswick Court of Appeal reduced his sentence. The reduction flows from the Supreme Court of Canada’s unanimous rejection of a federal law that allowed judges to close the door on parole for mass killers.
Like lashing, lobotomizing or torturing prisoners, the Supreme Court said in a May ruling, making offenders wait so long for their first parole hearings that they have no chance at rehabilitation is by its nature cruel and unusual, and out of step with Canadian values. In striking that punishment down, the court made its ruling retroactive to 2011, the year Stephen Harper’s government enacted a law that allowed judges to sentence multiple murderers to consecutive periods of parole ineligibility: for each first-degree murder, 25 years.
Under the law, some killers received sentences that would have forced them to wait 75 years for their first parole hearings – effectively, life without parole.
The prosecution in Mr. Bourque’s case initially asked for and received the 75-year waiting period for him. But it did not object to the reduction in his punishment, which a three-judge panel of the New Brunswick Court of Appeal said it was “duty-bound” to impose, because the Supreme Court had declared such sentences unconstitutional. His parole ineligibility period was reduced to 25 years, of which he has already served nine.
In its decision, the appeal court noted that the Supreme Court had said that a right to a parole hearing does not mean a right to release, and that the Parole Board would proceed with “care and caution.”
The decision has not been well received in New Brunswick.
“The community itself is still living in a bit of shock, even though it was a number of years ago,” said Michael Boudreau, a criminology professor at St. Thomas University in Fredericton. “ ‘Cruel and unusual punishment,’ they would argue, is what Justin Bourque inflicted on these three officers.”
His release on parole is unlikely, but not out of the question, said Mary Campbell, a former senior official at Public Safety Canada, which oversees the Parole Board of Canada.
“That horrendous crime will be still so fresh in the minds of victims and the community that 15 years from now I think his chances will be slim – not impossible,” Ms. Campbell said.
The parole board will take into account the severity of the crime, and look at what has changed since he committed the murders, Ms. Campbell added.
“He was heavily into drugs, very dark music, video games and that whole world. Presumably that will have changed. They will look at what has changed with him personally … He’ll need to come to some understanding of what he has done and accept some responsibility for it.”
The reduction in parole eligibility puts huge pressure on victims’ families, said Don Edwards, a former National Hockey League player whose mother and father were murdered by a man named George Harding Lovie in 1991. Because the crime took place long before the Harper-era sentencing law went into effect, Mr. Lovie’s parole ineligibility period was only 25 years.
Mr. Lovie was released on day parole after 28 years, and allowed at 31 years to sleep in his own apartment four nights a week. Considering Mr. Lovie’s release, Mr. Edwards said, he expects Mr. Bourque to be granted parole.
The victims’ families have “got to overwhelm the Parole Board with victim-impact statements,” he said. “I mean, it’s just got to be endless.” He experienced an “onslaught of nightmares” years in advance of Mr. Lovie’s release, he added.
At the time of the killings, Mr. Bourque, who is incarcerated in New Brunswick, was a 24-year-old loner and video-game fanatic who was obsessed with guns and believed the government was protecting the rich at the expense of the poor. He ambushed five RCMP officers, killing three and wounding two, on June 4, 2014. The city was placed under lockdown for 28 hours. Even his defence lawyer, David Lutz, described the killings to a lower-court judge as being among the most heinous crimes in Canadian history.
Mr. Bourque is now the latest member of a national gallery of mass killers – men who murdered small children, seniors, intimate partners, people experiencing homelessness, Muslim worshippers – to benefit from a reduction to 25 years of parole ineligibility.
Among the others are John Paul Ostamas, who beat to death three men experiencing homelessness in Winnipeg, and initially received 75 years ineligibility; Derek Saretzky of Alberta, whom the province’s appeal court described as an aspiring 22-year-old serial killer whose first victim, a 67-year-old woman, he considered “practice,” and who followed by killing a 27-year-old man and his two-year-old daughter; and Alexandre Bissonnette, who shot and killed six Muslims in a Quebec City mosque, and for whom prosecutors initially sought 150 years. (It was in Mr. Bissonnette’s case that the Supreme Court struck down the sentencing law that allowed consecutive periods of parole ineligibility.)
Mr. Lutz, the lawyer representing Mr. Bourque, said he had been obliged as an “officer of the court” to bring an appeal on behalf of his client, because of the Supreme Court ruling striking down the punishment retroactively. (At the initial sentencing, he asked for 50 years of ineligibility.)
He said in an interview he doubted Mr. Bourque would ever be released.
“The only time that I have ever heard of a person committing a particularly heinous crime who worked his way back to society was Nathan Leopold,” Mr. Lutz said.
Mr. Leopold, with his friend Richard Loeb, killed a 14-year-old boy in Chicago in 1924. He was paroled more than three decades later. “He taught other prisoners how to read and write … he worked in hospitals where there was tuberculosis. So that’s what it’s going to take to get a multiple murderer out in his lifetime,” Mr. Lutz said.