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Criminals With No Conscience


Criminals With No Conscience

http://www.opinion250.com/blog/view/13383/1/criminals+with+no+conscience

Sunday, July 19, 2009 03:44 AM


Decency is a Clear Conscience
 
by Justice Wallace Craig -retired
 
Since the 1970s, successive federal governments have maintained a policy in federal penitentiaries that stresses rehabilitation of convicts rather than protection of society.
 
That policy was based on a puerile notion that convicted criminals “sooner or later, will return to a normal life in our society.” It founders on the most intractable cohort among criminals: psychopaths, who, once released go back to their predatory ways.
 
It has been a long and slow process for me to understand the many facets of criminality, particularly psychopaths.
 
Here are a few highlights of my learning curve on psychopathic criminals.
 
One of my grade school classmates was a trouble maker; he defied rules and marched to his own drum-beat; his vandalism peaked with the torching of Sir Walter Moberly elementary school in south Fraser street area of Vancouver. When I graduated from high school, he graduated from juvenile delinquency to trafficking in heroin. When I first set foot in the magistrates court in Vancouver in 1955, on the first leg of my 20-year career as a lawyer, my classmate was there too, in custody, on his way to a 20-year jail sentence. And by coincidence we met again in the late 1970s, when my worn-out classmate appeared before me in bail court on a simple charge of possession of heroin. It was an instinctive moment of unspoken mutual recognition before we resumed our separate ways.
 
In 1955, when I hung out my shingle as an independent lawyer, I was a greenhorn without experience in dealing with thugs, thieves and swindlers; and no understanding of the wilfulness of psychopaths.
 
Some of the green rubbed off a couple of years later at Oakalla Prison, the grimmest of jails, during meetings with a client charged with armed bank robbery, and implicated in the subsequent murder of an accomplice. That case was an intense lesson in the selfish impulsivity and venality of violent psychopathic criminals.
 
In the mid-1960s, I gained my first insight into the existence of non-violent psychopaths when the raging success of Pyramid Mining Company hoisted the Vancouver Stock Exchange out of its penny-stock doldrums. The Pyramid bonanza and greater public interest in market plays made the exchange a magnet, drawing in a flock of eastern chiselers and promoters – soon followed by international hucksters.
 
My general practice soon became top heavy with run-of-the-mill speculative mining companies. I became wary of fast-talking promoters, and adopted a hard and fast rule that would eliminate the risk of becoming a co-conspirator in any fraudulent scheme: never take any shares; never act as a director; and render monthly billing for advice and services rendered. That left me with fewer clients, manageable in a formal solicitor/client relationship.
 
The most amusing and entertaining of clients is a promoter prepared to rush off to any part of the world in pursuit of a deal. In 1970, I encountered the real thing – Mons Kapoor – a dapper, smooth-tongued Howe Street promoter.
 
Kapoor wanted me to accompany him and his entourage to Sao Paulo, Brazil, to assist in negotiations with an American promoter; supposedly the owner of a Brazilian silver mine and smelter. To a hyper optimist, the future is now, and haste more important than prudence or caution. When I got to Sao Paulo I met an elderly, affable, easy-talking gent who openly stated that he was no longer welcome in the United States – all because of some trivial misunderstanding with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
 
In the next five days, I scratched out agreements in a desperate attempt to pin down the old con man, who talked endlessly and glowingly about the silver mine and smelter, deflecting all requests for an on-site inspection.
In the end Kapoor met his match in this sweet-talking old commercial psychopath.
 
In 1975, I began a 26-year stint as a judge in the criminal court at 222 Main Street in Vancouver. A never-ending line of persons paraded before me. Assuming that I averaged three each day, then at least 10,000 crooks, many of them psychopaths, experienced my on-the-spot justice.
 
During a 12-year period from 1987 to 1998, I conducted a number of trials involving white-collar crime.
 
One case revealed the zany mind of some commercial psychopaths.
    
Seven men were charged with conspiracy to defraud the public by a deceitful distribution of shares of Audit Resources Inc., a company trading on the Alberta Stock Exchange. An eighth conspirator, Floyd Leland Ogle, an American, was the evil genius behind the fraud.
 
On the day before the trial was to start, Ogle pleaded guilty and received a plea-bargained three-year sentence, with a commitment from the Crown that, so long as he testified against his broker, lawyer and stock-hustling junior partners, he would get an early release on parole and be sent back to the Louisiana. The trial began with Ogle in the witness box listening to, verifying, and consenting to the admission into evidence of some two hundred wire-tapped telephone conversations with his co-accused and third parties, all in stock-hustler vernacular that turned my courtroom into a comedy theatre. In one taped conversation Ogle told his confederates that he was going to buy a decommissioned weather ship, anchor it in English Bay, paint the name Audit Resources in huge lettering on its hull, and helicopter brokers aboard where they would be greeted by quality hookers and persuaded to hustle his stock.
  
While I was experiencing random encounters with psychopaths I was unaware of 25 years of research by Professor Robert D. Hare, of the University of British Columbia and his success in developing a psychopathy checklist for professional diagnosticians.
 
In Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, Hare argues that “It’s no overstatement to say that our internal controls make society work.” Yet hare is concerned over the increasing number of psychopaths moving among us who conduct themselves disentangled from the restraints of fear and anxiety – “the mainsprings of conscience” – and undeterred by potential punishment.
 
Hare maintains that the mark of a decent citizen is a clear conscience; that ever-present inner voice that tests intended behaviour against accepted moral and ethical considerations in determining whether intended behaviour is right or wrong.
Jul/20/2009, 7:59 am Link to this post  
 


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