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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Goderich Signal-Star, 1980-02-14, Page 17• I am, a near perfect specimen. Okay, there's a hint of , exn. beilishinent i • titat statement but a recent health examination w.ol,d4 support nay theory in part. To be I onest, I have managed to avoid the medical profession- for quite some years. Luckily my health has never warranted seeking out the services of the meticulous medics and even if it did I was always somewhat wary of going to the doctor. That was -until last week. The better half took the initiative to book this scribe an appointment for a checkup. ARRGH! Although somewhat reticent to have my fragile:bod poked and probed, I relented and was off to nieet my, examiner. Upon' entering the office ' there were ominous signs that sub- stantiated my earlier fears. "Good, morning Mr. Sykes," the 'receptionist offered. " We've been expecting you. Just have a seat." ,They've been expecting me. -Nobody even knew I was coming here. I had a Ilagging Suspicion the staff had already forint fated a prognosis prior to my xisit Poctors's waiting morns are always ,teal swell pplaces-. It is impossible to get cornfnrtable in the chairs and everyone lteepS to themselves, leafing through raganes though not reading a word, wrappedup in their own illness. I tlxou l'it I "Would make a little conversation with the other patients. Sort of brighten things up. " t21ex'e," I.Offered. giving them a sample:Of my winsome smile." I've got a highly contagious and communicable disease" Trfroom. cleared in a flash. The nurse:$enters, always cheerful,; and instructs me to go into a small room where 1, will find a plastic bottle with my name on .it. Sure enough on a small ledge at the end of a long line of ' small plastic bottles; half filled, is one with my name on it. I discover the container is even covered•by OHIP although I didn't take any:chances and had a large; red pail in the ' car as insurance. The nurse assured xrie t wouldn't it, " PYatrnrsllly on the morning of the visit, have gone to was1rnpm 949 times but basic hurxian functions elude Ohne facing the wtfs>peect of oiling this Small plastic. container, I feared the nurse would crime in at any instant to make sure I was still alive. After an eternity I proudly offered my sanaple,etated that I had stared ' down the first obstacle. I just got settled back in the'waiting room when the nurse entices me into ,another room: I follow at a . distance, suspicious of her every move. My next, obstacle is the eye chart., I had never suspected the old eye test but doctors are a crafty lot. Standing • at a d'istahce- the nurse intructs me to .cover my right eye and read a. line of letters. The little suckers are about 1/ inch high and I would have difficulty distinguishing them with both eyes open from a distance -of two feet. The nurse points to a line and I play along. "EFGCX(ISNHI3JJ," I blurt out. "He's a football player, isn't he?" "'One, letter at tune pleaSel Sykes,. the WOO, said with a hint et t►nxietY lq, hes y�oi;c�e. • Well' wow' ,the test which Tayno have been a smart tneve., U you hoer* doing well you eventually you wh d up i-. the examining room. The nurse closes the door and you sit alone facing the cold sterility of thevoorn,. Hut I put time to good use exarning ' the 102 diplomas and certificates adorning the walls, just to be certain this guy was schooled in the right places. The diplomas, although imnpresaive,. are not decorative,though, I presume they savea pile- of money on wall -.coverings or pictures. But I still have a fear df my examiner being a relative neophyte in .the medical profession and conducting the examination while consulting an operating manual. And with my luck he missed lectures the day they covered material concerning mysymptoms. My fears were unfounded and I was assured another visit won't be required for a few years. I think I can wait. inside this section: Jack's Jottings from Queen's Park Page 6A IODE marks 80 years in Canada - Page 9A Bob Trotter's One Foot in the Furrow Page 12A Engineer is special speaker at Rotary luncheon , Page 14A • Pollee say yes the 0 132 YEAR -7 1 eric STAR GODERICH SIGNAL -STAR, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 1980 SECOND SECTION shouia th�_a�a Constable George Lonsbary ofthe Goderich Police Force holds up one of the posters being used by the Canadian Police Association in a campaign for the reinstatement. of capital punishment: The 'campaign. urges people to find out what their political candidates feel about this issue. (Photo by Joanne Buchanan) BY JOANNE BUCHANAN Too Many people in Canada are getting away with murder. That is one of the slogans being used by the Canadian Police Association in its cam- paign for the rein- statement • of capital punishment. Capital punishment was abolished in this country in 1976 when 50 per cent of Parliament's elected representatives voted for the abolition. =The- _Canadian_ Pylic W Association says surveys at the time revealed, that 70 per cent • of 'the population favoured its retention however. The last 'actual act of capital punishment was carried out " in this country in 1962when a man named Fred Nash was hanged for his crime. The Canadian Police Association has made its point clear. It is for capital punishment whether a premeditated murder involves a policeman or a civilian. . Goderich Police Chief .. Pat King, as a member of the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police, supports' the Canadian Police „ Association's bid to have the death penalty rein- stated. And, he further agrees that 'the death penalty should not be restricted to the mur- derers of police officers and prison guards but should apply to allF of those persons charged and convicted of premeditated murder. "If a murderer is convicted and all appeals denied, he should be executed," states Chief King."The general trend. now is that people really couldn't care less about murdering somebody because they know they are not going to have to enaltyihe reinstated2._ pay the supreme price." Chief King says - all of the Canadianlaws work in favor of the criminal. "Our ,courts are not set up to gest cbnvictions like those " in the ":United` States," he says: "The rules of.. -evidence are always -on the side of the accused and the victim is forgotten, in the process.• The law bends over back- wards in order to protect the accused;" The Chief .says he does not necessarily think this type of le' -system is wrong. But, he says, with all the laws weighing__ heavily' -in favor of the accused and with all the appeal procedures, the chances of an innocent person being convicted of a murder he did not commit are "very remote indeed" There are no known figures on the number of people in Canada who may have wrongly been executed and Chief King says he can think ofonly one "alleged slip up" --the celebrated Coffin murder case. "But all of our laws and appeals greatly lessen the chances of the wrong person being executed. If by any chance a mistake was made, I think this would be offset by the number of people who have been murdered in Canada by people who have been 'previously convicted of other murders. We know that many convicted mur- derers murder again. "Those who oppose the death penalty, sometimes if it were otherwise. "Opposers of capital punishment say it doesn't deter murder, I first -11y believe it is a deterrent because those convicted murderers who have been executed in Canada. have certainly never murdered again. 'If a person knows that' he can die himself then. that' in itself is a deterrent," maintains Chief King. "At the moment 'there .is absolutely no deterrent when the person knows that the maximum he __faces_ in _prison. is probably 10 to 15 years." Chief King says he realizes that in this county, opinions con- cerning capital punish- ment are strongly divided because of the con- troversial Steven Truscott case. He .points out that the case has been re-examined at great cost to the- taxpayer and the original conviction still stands. "Unfortunately it is true,.that he was a young boy when convicted of the murder of Lynn Harper and he spent his teenage years and young manhood comfortably in prison but let us not forget Lynn Harper who spent her teenage years and young 'womanhood and still -spends them as a ,bundle of bones in a grave," he says. "I strongly urge people to think of the victims no matter how young the accused person is." On the• subject of the method of execution, I l,e li eve ;-thiTnk--that-the---( f police come up with the alleged murderer' by looking in a crystal ball and such is not the case. Any murder investigation is diligently and pain- stakingly carried out by the „police. agency in- volved and the police would not get to first base ie 'ming s a ' -thinks -- there are faster methods than hanging, for example, an injection with a quick acting poison. "If people are squeamish about a person administering it, it could be done by a machine," he adds. Chief King says the cabinet should not be given the right to grant clemency to those - sen- tenced to death. The death penalty, he stresses, is only for those convicted of premeditated murder or murder while committing a crime. Accidental murder and ' crimes of passion fall under a different category. Chief King says he has "Should prisons be soft places where criminals want to go back again?" Chief King says that policemen these days do not take chances with.. criminals. "If a criminal shoots at a policeman -and kills him, the public is up in arms for a day or two but if a policeman, in defending ,himself, kills the criminal, he is subject to internal investigations always found the plea of, and cries of police not guilty due to insanity, -brutality by the public difficult to comprehend. and if the person killed by "A person who corn- the policeman is .a _mits.__a.._crime.-.today- ..is ..uveni-le ter of--a---different sometimes not charged race, the reaction is twice for weeks,. months or `as bad," he says. years. and the "There have been psychiatrists don't see " incidents in Goderich him for another week or where guns have been two after that. He bases, used against policemen •his opinion on what the accused tells him all that time after the incident and when the accused already knows he has been charged. And the psychiatrists at a murder trial almost always differ in opinion. "Unfortunately, there are so many cases where the accused is declared insane and sent to an institution only to come out and kill again. "If a person, having been declared insane, was put away and never, ever released, not even for day parole, then perhaps people would feel a lot safer." Chief King says that rehabilitation is the "key word" these days but he believes that some people can definitely not be rehabilitated. „Why Shofd we risk_ the life of even one person being murdered simply because a criminal has been declared rehabilitated?" Not much punishment is involved in going to• prison, says Chief King, and it costs a lot of money to keep people in prison. -and' those who believe policemen cannot be shot and killed' in small- towns are like the ostrich. The criminal element is highly mobile today so a Montreal bank robber could be here in Goderich in several hours:' "Per capita in any small town or rural area, there are probably more guns than in the cities so the chances of policemen being shot, while not as frequent, certainly are there. Police officers everywhere have to be alert to this fact." Between 1960 and 1980, 60 policemen have been killed on duty, II of them in motor vehicle ac- cidents. From January 1978 to January •1980 alone, eight police of- ficers have been killed in the line of duty. The most recent -death of a police officer occured on January 23 at 10:30 p.m. in Delhi when Constable Duncan McAleese, a member of the Simcoe O.P.P. and married man with three children, was, gunned down in front of a san- dwich shop after being lured to the area by a phone call •which promised information for a case he was working on. The man who has been arrested in connection with the murder is said to have been upset about a previous drug conviction.. , Sixteen years ago this same man shot a police officer in Coldwater, says Fred McDonald,. executive manager of the Ontario Provincial Police Association. He was convicted "of attempted murder and give ,a four year sentence of which he _s.erved-.._ _three. -years-and- three months. The police officer in Coldwater was not killed but still carries his wounds today (he lost, three fingers in the . in- cident) . Constable George Lonsbary of the Goderich Police ' Force says `' he believes in the rein- statement of capital punishment for everyone convicted of , premeditated murder. He says he tries not td dwell on the fact that he could be killed in the line of duty but admits that "it - takes cases like the one in Simcoe to make you stop and think". Constable Larry Webb of the Goderich force says, "It probably bothers our wives more than it does us. A lot of officers don't tell their wives e'Verything that goes on because they would just worry." Constable Webb says he thinks the death penalty is a deterrent 'despite what sociologists, psythiatrists and 'Tho - called enlightened people" say. "The people who do the studies on criminals see them under controlled circumstances. We bee them in the heat of the moment," says Webb, Turn to page 2A • J My wife and I mutually agreed on a role reversal the other night. I had to go back out to work and rather than change and go to the barn (we keep a few horses) I suggested I start supper and she go to the barn. The suggestion seemed simple enough. I could begin to warm some food while she did the chores and hopefully I would have a few minutes to sit down before heading back out, the door. But there was more to my end of the bargain than met the eye. First let me explain my -views on cooking. If it requires more than three steps to prepare, macaroni requires three, toast requires three ^and soup requires thrlee, I put it back in the cupboard. The menu last night was a three event special that took far more than three steps. First there was the staple; hamburg. I decided to turn the ground beef into my now world famous hamburg pate (one egg, celery salt and onion salt). Singing softly just like your basic French chef I began mixing the ingredients and shaping , patties. Nothing to it. I fired up burner one, lined the frying pan with patties ' and set about to prepare the spuds. I had to choose between peeling, slicing and preparing or pulling a bag of frozen hash browns out of the freezer and passing them over some heat. The hash browns looked easier. I read the instructions and 'discovered I should have put the patties in the broiler and used the frying pan for the hash browns. No problem: An alternative was to put some oil in •a frying pan and fry the frozen squares of potatoe. I resurected°the back up frying pan, shifted the patties to a small burner at the rear of the stove and began to turn the hash browns into a delicacy. That's when things began to get corrrplicated. The patties began resembling hockey pucks from the extreme heat I had put them on and grease from the pan was lining the stove top and the wall. The hash browns were slowly turning to mush instead of retaining their square shape and my side order of corn was turning; into a lump in the middle of the sauce pan. Recalling one of the basic axioms of cooking, stay calm, I adjusted burner controls , and shifted pans to try to rectify the situation. My moves proved useless. The patties were now becoming things NASA may be interested in and the hash browns were one solid mass in the middle of the.pan. Noting that the best I could do with the supper had been done I rang the dinner bell. Nobody showed. My wife needed another five minutes to finish in the barn and the kids were busy preparing valentines for their friends. It was then I realized I was carrying the role reversal too far. I chucked the flipper into the sink, turned off all the burners on the stove and announced that when, everyone was ready supper was -on the stove. The kids heeded the message and appeared at the table- If they were unimpressed by my offerings they didn't show it preferring to silenty chew up the hamburg pate. My wife took her five rrainutes and before she could complain about the condition of supper I told her she should have come when she was called. My antics were somewhat suc- cessfull. Next time I cook anything when I call for bodies they'll be there. But I can't help wonder if I'l1 be there when my wife calls me for one of her efforts. Sometimes there's more important things to do dear. o By the way. Happy Valentines. jeff Seddon ,e: r