It is completely inconsistent for the Conservative government to oppose the recent death sentence of a Canadian in Saudi Arabia while standing by and doing nothing for a Canadian sentenced to death in Montana. The government has decided to seek clemency for 23 year old Mohamed Kohail; however they refuse to seek clemency or support Ronald Smith, simply because he was condemned by the United States.
This government needs to wake up and stop endorsing everything the neo-conservatives do in the U.S. out of blind loyalty. The state should never have the right to take the life of an individual, no matter how 'democratic' or 'fair' the trial may have been.
While I do support Canadian efforts to spare Kohail's life, I want these efforts to also extend to Smith as well in order to achieve consistency in the Canadian position. The government deserves no praise for only doing what's right sometimes.
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To me, if you visit a country(in this case I believe the guy has dual citizenship), it is your personal responsibility to know the laws of the land. Both Saudi Arabia and certain states in the USA have the death penalty, and if you go there and kill someone, you have to be willing to face the consequences for that.
To me, the inconsistency in our gov'ts response can be explained by the statement I read in the news article at CTV:
"Kohail was in court nine times for about 10 minutes each time leading up to the verdict."
Does that sound like a normal murder trial to you? Would you want a judge to sentence you to public beheading without ever having spent more than 10 minutes in a row with you? Isn't sharia law grand...
Are you seeing why maybe, regardless of your position on the death penalty (I'm not going into that right now), that we can trust that the American justice system probably offered a fair and free trial? And conversely that perhaps we should be a bit skeptical of the Saudi justice system?
I think that the government should only intervene in cases where there is reason to doubt the legitimacy of the "trial." Otherwise, don't kill someone in a foreign land!
I agree with you that the justice encountered by Kohail in Saudi Arabia was far less than ideal or fair, I believe that the Canadian government should treat all cases involving Canadians sentenced to death equally, no matter what country the crime occured in.
I also believe that it is a bit of a stretch to declare that American
trials are 'fair and free'. While they might not be as bad as trials in Saudi Arabia, it cannot be denied that the American justice does not treat all accused criminals equally or fairly. People face discrimination all the time in American courts on the basis of their ethnicity, race,
religion, etc. Poverty especially excludes people from obtaining a fair sense of justice.
I don't think that any criminal justice system is so transparent, just, and fair today that a death sentence coming out of it should not be challenged. If the US system is the fairest in the world, then no system is good enough to execute any criminal.
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