Woman cleared of murder still treasures locket with photo of man she k

[Shwa]

Woman cleared of murder still treasures locket with photo of man she killed

She had admitted plunging a knife into her longtime boyfriend’s neck while he was driving along a west-end Toronto street. Her lawyer Howard Goldkind portrayed Gillespie as a “ticking time bomb” and Lewis as a long-suffering victim of his regular beatings.

Gillespie’s mother, Marjorie, was outraged Lewis was acquitted, maintaining her son was defenceless holding a steering wheel while Lewis sat in the car’s backseat.

I don't get this. I understand that Jermaine Gillespie was a nasty piece of work, a violent, abusive criminal who appeared to be a sociopath than anything. But she was carrying a knife, stabbed him when he was defenceless and it is somehow not worthy of even a token sentence or even a reprimand for actually killing someone?

Christie Blatchford: Gilding the lily in domestic violence case

It all makes as much sense as the following little scene.

When Mr. Goldkind was approaching one of the big moments in his examination-in-chief, this where he would ask Ms. Lewis to describe the fateful moments in the car, he first elicited from her that Mr. Gillespie had been calling her bad names.

“Are those names you feel comfortable telling us in court?” he asked gently. “No,” said Ms. Lewis with becoming shyness.

“You feel uncomfortable using those words?” he asked again.

“Yes,” she said softly.

Yet in her diaries where she railed with rage about Mr. Gillespie, Ms. Lewis used foul language with ease and genuine familiarity.

It would be easier to understand domestic violence in the general or the specific if the participants would stop compulsively gilding every poor lily within sight.

[Shwa]

An interesting take on the OP story and another one in Toronto:

Jury verdicts raise question: Has become acceptable for ‘bad people’ to be killed?

In less than a week, two Toronto juries have acquitted defendants who admitted killing people who may or may not have been armed.

Both trials featured victims with violent pasts and frequent run-ins with the law, leading some to speculate on the role that played in the verdicts and whether it has become acceptable for “bad people” to be killed.

“I do not think the character of a victim of crime should be relevant to whether the accused should be punished — but it often is,” law professor James Morton wrote on his blog after Melissa Lewis walked free.

Is it? Another lingering question is the amount of resources the police put into catching criminals who kill other criminals. In Toronto, there doesn't seem to be the same effort and who can blame them? In my most unsympathetic moments, I am inclined to applaud that sort of ethic, but how useful is it really, especially when the criminals start killing each other in the open, in areas not prone to such violence.

In Ottawa this week, two known criminals were gunned down inside their tanning salon in a mall.

Shooting death a payback: Cops

I suppose the public element of the crime might put pressure on the police to apply just investigation, but what about those killings that are in areas prone to violence, the ghettos, etc? DO we care as much about justice in those situations?