Tag Archives: bc justice

BC Court And The Raymond Caissie Story

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Recently there has been a lot of story revolving around the murder of the 17-year-old Surrey student named Serena Vermeersch. According to all the news reports I heard the main suspect was a man named Raymond Caissie where he had a history of criminal activities and was put in jail as a result. The main controversy was that in the court system he was deemed as a person who was highly like to re-offend. However, it appears that after he served his time he was pretty much free to go. It’s because of this unfortunate incident that people are now questioning items like why he didn’t serve a longer sentence. To note as well, to my knowledge nothing has been fully proven yet.

This is the kind of thing that became more apparent to me after going through my civil case experience in the court system. As I expressed before, while my case wasn’t a criminal matter I could easily see why more serious matters like these produce the results that they do. It just feels like the system is set up in such a way where it’s more about processing as many cases as possible to say “we did something” and then moving on to the next issue.

Two points I heard was that it makes no sense to keep everyone in jail forever. So longer sentences from a Judge isn’t the answer. At the same time, making orders to keep people monitored costs way too much money. It made me wonder, what could the solution be? This might be a crazy thought, but thinking back to my civil case example court documentation can play a huge role.

Can you imagine if there were actual court videos for the cases and open transcripts for the public to see on say a government funded website for free? That would sure make a criminal really think more about consequences as people can easily research and spread what is happening in their community for free. As of now though, in many cases there is no such thing and to get things like transcripts it costs hundreds of dollars. So if anything a court sentence can in many ways simply be like two people privately having a despite at home without the public knowing what happened.

Hopefully the system will become more accessible and that it doesn’t take more cases like this to get people to realize that an update is necessary.

Too Much Benefit of The Doubt For The Accused or Not

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I was reading this crazy story recently about a lady named Jojo Geronimo who owned a tattoo parlor here in BC. Allegedly her and her client named Byron Thomas Hobbs was having some kind of dispute over scheduling and this resulted in physical fight. Crazy enough, this was all captured on tape and has been available through social media. Have a look yourself and I think you will be shocked too:

The main controversy that seemed to be arising out of this is that the accused is on the streets again pretty quickly which makes you wonder what is going on inside those court systems. Sadly enough, even I expressed how for my case even though it wasn’t say a deadly criminal case I can easily see why these cases turn out the way they do. In my opinion, from personal experience it comes down to giving too much benefit of the doubt.

I obviously don’t know all the details for this case, but if I was to reflect this with my own I can imagine them first having to go through this ludicrous pre-trial setting without simply going straight to the facts. Ironically, as I expressed before it’s the victims that essentially get the short end of the stick as it feels like the system is built to process cases as opposed to resolving them. How many more stories like these it will take for some serious change?