Justice Rots in the Refrigerator Unserved and Stinking
Call me Captain Ass Dragger for failing to give this story the attention it deserves; but Bastard Logic has summed up everything I could possibly convey about this case and has given pertinent updates.
For all those twits who really really really care about sex workers and think canning the industry will solve everything, try advocating for a legal system that values their lives as much as it values others in the meantime. Because right now, it ain’t happening.
The day after admitting he killed a woman and dumped her body on a rural road, a St. Catharines, Ont., man was released from jail.Judge Stephen Glithero sentenced Wayne Ryczak, 55, to one day in jail on Thursday for the death of 29-year-old Stephine Beck.
The one-day sentence is in addition to time Ryczak already served since his March 5, 2007, arrest — time the judge said was equivalent to 30 months.“Devastated, we’re devastated,” Beck’s mother, Alice Dort, said from her home in Nova Scotia shortly after a police detective broke the news by phone. “This is just so unbelievable.” “There’s no justice. None whatsoever. I’m just so disgusted.”
The Crown asked for seven to 10 years in jail.
Ryczak’s lawyer requested two years less a day to be served in the community.
After deliberating for 20 minutes, Glithero said a 30-month sentence in the penitentiary would be appropriate and Ryczak had already served it. Ryczak was also given three years’ probation.
Exactly what I needed to wake up to. Thanks, Canada!
This is fucking disgusting. A 30-month sentence is appropriate for killing a woman? Sure, if she has sex for money! After all, if you ladies happen to think you can do whatever you want with that vagina of yours, you deserve whatever itis that you get.
Fuck, I am so angry.
A bit of an aside: Over at the original post, people kept bringing up points about the botched math. When I worked for the Public Defender, my supervising attorney told me that the reason why the sentences have disparities is there isn’t enough room to accommodate prisoners for the lengths of time out there.
So if a defendant is sent to prison for 30 days, they wind up serving about 17 of them with credit for good behavior while in jail. If they’re not good, they don’t leave. There’s a whole nuanced system of how the time served is calculated that I figure it would take me longer than five months to learn. My supervisor has practiced for about 10 years and he’s still grasping the nuances of it.
It’s a complex way of dealing with the sad problem that the current system of incarceration cannot keep pace with the government’s criminalization of the most trivial acts.
It’s a bit different in Ontario, although I’m sure the reason behind the practice–not enough room to accommodate prisoners–is similar. We have what are called ‘2 for 1′ credits, given to prisoners who are remanded pre-trial. The bad optics of the sentence handed down by the Judge in this case have caused some to call for a review of this sort of sentencing.
Sylvia and Matt, thank you for posting and talking about this. I have a couple of thoughts about it and I hope that none of what I have to say obscures the fact that I am glad you both care. I am very glad.
I will try to explain what is nagging at me, but am not sure if it will read clearly… I was going to say - yes it’s horrifying how people outside of the sex industry (”outside” of people who work in it or people who use it) find women prostitutes disposable. (In addition to the people inside the industry - users or participants - who find us disposable.)
But then it hit me that I don’t actually have the belief that those who legally enforce that disposability - like this particular judge for instance even - are necessarily *outside* of the sex industry, for one thing. I don’t assume that this judge, or any judge, or anyone with any role in the “justice” system does not use the sex industry. What I assume is that it’s possible that any/all of them do.
I don’t think it’s that “some johns hate us (or women in general) so much that they kill us,” and “society hates us so much that they don’t care when we get killed.” I think that, mostly, those who have the power to make it legally matter when we get killed are a population - like the rest of the population - full of people who are johns.
And I have known and even liked/loved enough johns to know that even the least-demonstrably hateful of them still considers us disposable, certainly in relation to themselves.
It’s not that I am unaware of the lethal judgements plenty of people who are neither johns nor prostitutes have towards prostitutes, or that I deny that any of those people have power. I’m thinking of the woman judge in the news a while ago who had reduced a case of rape to “theft of services” because it was a prostitute who had been raped.
I’m just not convinced that the “justice” system is ruled by non-johns who cluck their tongues at us whores and then look the other way when people hurt us, so much as it is ruled by people who, as a class, have a vested interest in maintaining our disposability. So long as that is true, I don’t have a lot of hope that everybody else caring about prostitutes outside of that rule will change what happens to us.
And I also feel like, there’s something about the statement (understood to be sarcastic) “if you ladies happen to think you can do whatever you want with that vagina of yours, you deserve whatever it is that you get,” that misses it for me. I do know that sexual autonomy is mostly not acceptable for women, but I don’t feel like sexual autonomy is why this prostitute got killed, and why nobody cared enough about it for her murderer to be punished.
I don’t think that the people who judge and hate prostitutes - whether enough to kill them/us or enough to not care if others do - hate them/us because of sexual autonomy. People who get paid to do whatever they want with their vaginas would never make enough to live on, doing what they want with their vaginas. You always have to do at least some things, some amount of the time, that is about what someone else wants you to do with your vagina. People are for sure uncomfortable with the notion that I might be turned on during something I am also getting paid for, but if doing something I don’t feel turned on by, “just for the money,” weren’t the worse transgression, then neither clients nor friends nor strangers would be extra-disgusted by that the way they are.
What I mean is that it’s doing whatever *you* (the general you of people who use the sex industry) want me to do with my vagina, for money, that makes me the unbelievably gross, debased, disposable monster to both the johns and everybody else. Doing solely what *I* want to do with my vagina (the general I of women as a population, in or out of the sex industry), while not encouraged or approved, is still so rare, really, that it’s not possible this whole system of prostitutes-as-hated-disposable-population could be organized around it.
Thanks again for this post, and for letting me get this stuff off my chest.