Qualities of mercy

Of two reports from Canada, both of which I must take at face value, one does deal with the Nathalie Gettliffe affair and one does not.

When I express the hope that this wretched woman will be dealt with mercifully two weeks from now, I respectfully draw the sentencing judge's attention to the second matter, a quite extraordinary case that has nothing to do with her.

I had just finished reading the Globe and Mail website account of the latest judicial attack on Gettliffe, this time by one Madam Justice Nicole Garson, when I saw another Canadian court report.

Pair held teen girls as sex slaves, ran the headline to a story from the Court of Queen's Bench in Manitoba.

The crimes of this evil pair, accused in connection with vile sexual assaults on two abducted girls aged 12 and 13, make for sickening reading. The woman's role included holding one victim by the shoulders while her companion raped her. She "played no part in the abduction", the judge said, but was guilty of forcible confinement.

The couple have had their comeuppance. But those tough-on-crime, show-'em-no-compassion champions of Canadian justice who inhabit this blog will have some explaining to do if a Vancouver judge comes down heavily on Gettliffe when she is sentenced (I am told on Dec 1).

For that comeuppance amounted, for our friendly neighbourhood sex fiends, to 10 years for the man, four for the woman. Credits for time served awaiting trial mean that man will serve only seven years for ruining two girls' lives.

Astonishingly, his co-accused qualified for almost immediate release under the so-called two-for-one scheme taking account of her two years spent in custody.

Nathalie Gettliffe was foolish and wrong to take her two children by her former husband, Scott Grant, to France in defiance of a court order. She may, as Judge Garson implied in the latest hearing, have begun criticising the religious activites of her former husband only after her flight.

I remain of the view that the humanitarian approach would nevertheless have been to grant Gettliffe bail, on whatever terms Canadian judges chose to impose, rather than force her to give birth as a prisoner and keep that poor infant in jail for the first weeks of his life.

That doesn't mean I swallow the more extravagant claims of some of Gettliffe's supporters about the treatment she has received in prison. I have no reliable information on suggestions that at least one suspected killer and people accused of serious drug offences have been freed on bail within the same jurisdiction that requires a heavily pregnant woman to be locked up in a child custody case.

Nor do I see it as especially edifying to see Gettliffe putting herself up for the French presidency.

Judge Garson appears to have made some compelling points, while refusing Gettliffe joint custody of Grant's children, about the effects of her actions. She had denied the children, she said, "permission to love their father" by taking them to France despite the court order and then vilifying him.

While I would not like to give the impression that this seemed an even-handed judgment, Judge Garson did increase Gettliffe's disgracefully meagre access to the children.

She also ordered that a neutral French speaker should be present at these meetings - once a fortnight under the more generous provisions - to prevent disparaging remarks about Grant or his religion. I am aware of no such order restraining Grant in what he says to the children (or the Canadian press) about their mother.

But let us get back to the kidnappers and where I feel their treatment has some bearing on what the Gettliffe sentencing judge, whoever this turns out to be, has to decide.

Assuming - big assumption, I know - that we now more or less know the worst about Gettliffe, is there a judge in British Columbia who could review the two cases and regard her as meriting a moment's further imprisonment? Another learned man of the bench has, after all, set down two years in pre-trial custody as a sanction stiff enough for a woman involved in what the Globe and Mail called "one of the province's most shocking sex crimes"?