GUNTER: Blame Liberals' lax bail system for daylight fatal stabbing at Edmonton LRT station
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Seven years in prison. That’s all. With time served while awaiting trial and sentencing, Jamal Wheeler will likely be out in just four-and-a-half.
Two summers ago, at an Edmonton transit station, Wheeler, a lifelong drug addict and violent criminal, used a knife to attack a complete stranger, unprovoked, in broad daylight. A single blow to the chest of Rukinisha Nkundabatware — known as Nkunda to his family and members of Edmonton’s Congolese community — left the new Canadian and father of seven dead in the middle of the street, where he had run and collapsed after being stabbed.
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His assailant, Jamal Joshua Malik Wheeler, 29, had a long history of violent behaviour, including at least two earlier convictions for random attacks on transit riders. And still, Court of King’s Bench Justice Kent Teskey sentenced him to just seven years in prison for taking another person’s life.
But before blaming the judge for the leniency, consider that last fall Crown prosecutors had accepted a guilty plea to a lesser charge (manslaughter rather than murder) and the Crown had asked the judge only for a seven- to nine-year sentence in the current case.
The problem is not the judge. It’s not even the particularly light sentence. It’s the bail system and the reforms the Liberal government made to it in 2019 that let Wheeler be free the day he decided he needed to brutalize Nkunda.
At the time he murdered Nkunda, Wheeler was out on bail for an earlier assault. And he was in breach of one of his bail conditions, too, namely to stay off Edmonton Transit property.
Not only was Wheeler trespassing on city property, he was living there, in a tent.
Had he not been given bail, Wheeler would have been in jail where he couldn’t have killed Nkunda. And even if he had been released, if his bail conditions were being enforced, it’s less likely Wheeler would have been near the transit stop where he attacked Nkunda.
Wheeler has had an astonishingly hard life, no doubt about it. He has mental impairments that would be difficult to treat.
His father was an absent drug dealer. His mother was an addict who got him started on illicit drugs herself. He has been diagnosed with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and ADHD. As a result, a court report states Wheeler has “significantly impaired cognitive development,” is undereducated and will always have difficultly holding a job or even functioning in the wider society.
The defence also submitted what is called a Gladue report — a summary of the ways an accused’s Indigenous background has affected his or her ability to avoid crime. Wheeler is Metis.
(Frankly, I think Gladue reports are too often a dodge that act like “get out of jail free” cards. But that’s a topic for another day.)
Still, why should Nkunda be dead just because the Liberals, the academic theorists and the corrections system have made laxity towards criminals the central focus of our justice system?
The public and, especially victims, were already an afterthought before the 2019 bail reforms. Since then, letting violent criminals wander our streets has been seen as the fastest way to reform them from their criminal behaviours and reintegrate them into society, no matter the collateral cost to law-abiding Canadians.
It’s “expert” hogwash. And the proof that the theory is a dangerous failure is that more than 40 per cent of murders in Canada since bail was made all but automatic have been committed by someone on release.
It’s possible to have sympathy for Wheeler and his horrific childhood, to implement treatment and counselling on the inside of prisons, without putting the public at genuine risk from having such murderers, muggers and rapists at large while they await trial, particularly when their violent histories are obvious.
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