Western Standard - November 30, 2022


Latest weak sentence given to a very dangerous offender

Mentioned
Justin Van Harten Bobby Crane Leonard Smith Harry Van Harten
Robots could be licensed to kill in California Douglas Murray DESTROYS Canadian legacy media.

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

179.61

Word count

891

Sentence count

68

Harmful content

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Bobby Crane, 25, was released from prison last week after serving less than a year of his sentence for the attempted murder of a 65-year-old man who was waiting for a ride to work in Edmonton, Alberta.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 So last May at 621 in the morning on a weekday, 65-year-old Leonard Smith, he stood on an LRT
00:00:07.220 platform waiting for a train to take him to work. Now Smith has to take the train because he's
00:00:11.560 visually impaired. He's almost blind. Now suddenly Smith was attacked by a man who cut his throat
00:00:16.720 from ear to ear with a utility knife. He made a 24-centimeter gash. Doctors told Crane the knife
00:00:22.580 missed his carotid artery by a mere four millimeters. And had that artery been cut,
00:00:26.580 Crane surely would have been killed for the crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
00:00:32.400 Now the man who randomly cut Smith's throat is a violent chronic offender named Bobby Crane. Crane
00:00:39.300 had been sentenced to six and a half years of jail time over multiple crimes since 2019.
00:00:44.860 That math doesn't add up well, does it though? Clearly he didn't serve that time as he was free
00:00:48.940 to attempt to murder an elderly visually impaired man last May. Now last week in an Alberta court,
00:00:55.480 Judge Harry Van Harten sentenced Crane to two years less a day to ensure Crane doesn't have
00:01:01.980 to go to a federal prison. With time served and remand, Crane's going to be on the streets
00:01:06.700 in a little more than a year. I wonder if he'll succeed in killing somebody during his next period
00:01:11.220 of freedom. Van Harten noted that treatment for FASD would serve Crane better than doing prison time.
00:01:18.160 This may indeed be true. Prison does have a way of making dangerous offenders even worse
00:01:22.520 if they aren't treated for whatever their underlying issues are. We should be looking
00:01:25.960 at ways to reform offenders and avoiding prison when possible, and we need to expand our treatment
00:01:30.380 options. But that said, public safety has to come first, and Judge Harry Van Harten has not done so.
00:01:37.700 With an offender as dangerous as Crane, we need to seek treatment options while he is secured.
00:01:41.780 Letting him out is just inviting another random crime against an innocent citizen.
00:01:46.220 And then this is where it gets worse. Justin Van Harten went further than just pointing out
00:01:49.420 how Crane needed FASD treatment. He said that generational trauma from European society
00:01:56.220 is caused to...generational trauma, European society is caused to indigenous communities 0.82
00:02:01.780 has to be addressed. Really? And we address that by freeing dangerous criminals?
00:02:07.520 If indeed this generational trauma is going on, where is the judge going with this?
00:02:12.500 And he also said, the history of colonialism has to be taken into account. 0.99
00:02:16.540 What a load of what crap. Crane is 25 years old. He never attended a residential school, 0.99
00:02:22.460 and he likely can't even define colonialism. I no doubt he's had a hard life, and our messed up
00:02:28.040 reserve system has doubtless contributed to that. This doesn't, though, negate the risk that Crane
00:02:35.480 presents to society. We need to examine our entire First Nations system. Absolutely. The reserve system 1.00
00:02:41.040 is failing by every measure, and the outdated Racist Indian Act should be repealed.
00:02:44.980 That giant ball of wax, though, is not Justin Van Harten's responsibility. Van Harten should have
00:02:49.900 been considering what risk Crane would present if released, rather than dwelling on the broader
00:02:53.580 issues of European influence on modern history. I do hope to be wrong, but I fear I won't be.
00:02:59.360 Crane is going to re-offend violently and soon after being released. They don't just get better
00:03:03.900 after a little while there. He randomly picked out an elderly handicapped man and tried to murder him
00:03:09.340 for cutting his throat. He's a cowardly, violent man, and he won't be any less so in a year and 1.00
00:03:14.540 change from now. I know we need better ways to treat offenders, but until those means of treatment 0.98
00:03:18.880 are developed and available, the best way to protect the public from violent people like Bobby Crane
00:03:23.160 remains incarceration. The system's failing to protect us, and woke judges like Van Harten should be
00:03:29.020 held accountable if we're harmed by their refusal to incarcerate dangerous offenders.
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