The infamous Dennis Markuze/David Mabus, who has been harrassing skeptics and atheists for over 20 years, has been sentenced. A suspended sentence.
Markuze’s suspended sentence includes three years of probation during which he is required to follow treatment with Semeniuk and to take any medication prescribed to him. He is also forbidden to communicate with Farley through the Internet, Twitter or other forms of social media. He is also not allowed to communicate with anyone who is part of the same educational forum as Farley.
Uh, what? He was told not to send his screeds out before this sentence — there’s been a reduction in volume, I’ll give him that, but he still periodically goes on a Depeche Mode/Nostradamus/death threat binge. I have no expectation that he’ll actually obey this order.
Isn’t it nice for Tim Farley that he’s been told he can’t harangue Tim Farley any more? What about the rest of us? If he starts spamming me with more email, what recourse do I have? This is exactly why I gave up on trying to deal with him — I have no expectation that anything will be done.
(via Digital Cuttlefish)
I wonder if judges will ever start to take online harassment and threat campaigns seriously. I guess not.
@1 Perhaps if more judges are targets of harassment?
Just to be clear, post #2 is not a call to action, OK, just a cynical (and fairly trite) observation
Sorry, PZ, I am not with you on this one (not that might being with or against you is of any import). We are dealing with the Canadian criminal justice system and I am proud that we do not put mentally ill people in prison with the frequency or for the duration that the US system does.
The guy is sick. He is being required to continue with treatment, and there appears to be some evidence that the treatment is having some effect. I am sure that to Americans we seem like bleeding hearts, too soft on non-violent criminals (and probably on violent ones as well) but I am far happier with our approach to criminal justice than what I read about the US alternative. Note that the Court heard and presumably accepted expert opinion evidence that he poses no significant threat of violence.
I’d far rather live in a society that imposed sentences of this nature on someone like him than one in which the reaction to the acting out by the mentally ill is to lock them up in prison for an extended period of time. Ask yourself this: assume he went to a prison for 12 months and then got out….do you think that he would be less likely to reoffend than if he follows the 3 year program of psychiatric treatment to which he has been sentenced? Bear in mind that if he breaches his probation, he stands to get sentenced all over again.
FWIW, I have myself been targeted (by two separate individuals) with online/email harassment, to the point that at one time the local police contacted me to advise that they suspected that one of my harassers was on her way to my office with a rifle….it was a false alarm but quite worrying, given that the person involved had made explicit threats, and was seriously mentally ill. I don’t get the volume nor the intensity of harassment that you do, but I am not naïve about how one feels about this sort of thing.
This is just a speedbump.
FTFA:
If he goes off meds (likely) or stops doing whatever his psych says (???), then the sentence is reapplied in full — at least that’s how it works in the US. YMMV, Canada.
Also:
Does anyone doubt he’ll start riding that horse again? The same consequence when he does.
Also:
In what planet is he allowed to roam free if he’s using? He should be subject to weekly drug tests for the entire duration of his suspended sentence, and then monthly if he makes it to probation. The moment he tokes, shoots or snorts, he should be thrown back in prison.
I think what is needed here is a middle course. I agree that prison is unlikely to do Markuze any good beyond the time it keeps him out of circulation and could well make him worse. At the same time, given his past history while on probation leaving him at large doesn’t strike me as very effective either. Perhaps what should be used would be a locked mental health facility where he can be very closely monitored and treated until he can demonstrate that he can control his impulses sufficiently to refrain from doing the things that got him in trouble in the first place.
@5
That is not necessarily true even in the US. After a finding of a violation of probation, the judge has enormous discretion to do anything from simply continuing him on probation to imposing the full backup sentence — or anything in between.
I know very little about Markuze, but from what little I’ve seen here it doesn’t sound like probation with mandatory mental health treatment is an unreasonable outcome. I largely agree with stillacrazycanuck.
Montreal police took no action until Markuze/Mabus started harassing them, so yeah probably.
@6
We don’t lock up people for being mentally ill unless they are found to pose a risk of physical injury or death to themselves or others. In particular, we don’t lock people up for being ill when the only expert evidence is to the contrary, and I am proud to be a member of a society that holds to that approach.
Btw, and more generically, I abhor the practice of criticizing judicial decisions based on newspaper reports. I am not speaking about criticizing sexist or racist remarks made by the Judge: I am speaking about second-guessing the verdicts or sentences. As a trial lawyer, I know beyond doubt that no newspaper (let alone radio or television) news report fairly captures all of the factors known to the Judge. For example, in Canada, after a criminal conviction which could result in prison time, there will be a lengthy pre-sentence report, and at best the media will report short excerpts therefrom….if only because the report is not usually read in full, so the reporters won’t even know everything that it contains.
Media is in the business of selling advertising, and printing headlines and stories about soft sentences in criminal matters is a sure-fire way to generate outrage, improve circulation, and sell advertising. We, as secular thinkers, should be very careful not to let ourselves be fooled into thinking that the news stories are full, complete and balanced.
One thing I see missing is a keystroke monitor on every digital device he owns, and severe penalties, including either the psychiatric hospital or prison, for using non-monitored devices. This could monitor his behavior.
I am not advocating for life in prison for Markuze; neither am I urging that Canada implement the death penalty.
I am saying that this sort of vague slap on the wrist hasn’t worked before, why should we expect it to work now? I’m also kind of annoyed that the one bit of specificity was to say Markuze cannot contact one person.
One person? No, one person and that person’s associated site! As commenter Pierce Butler says on my site, all we need to do is sign Tim Farley up to an FtB blog, and we’re covered!
@11
So what is it that you want the Canadian criminal justice system to do to a mentally ill, non-violent offender? And what purpose is served thereby?
It’s funny.
I’m the person who tells students to consider context, to remember there is a huge difference between two utterances of the same threat. I know that Mabus’s promise to cut off my head is very different from what Taslima Nasrin has faced on a regular basis for months, if not years.
This is a tough one. I don’t hate him; I want him to get help. I don’t ever want to meet him in person, mind you. I’m glad the judge likes the psych experts, and I’m glad it’s not a death sentence. But this dude told me my family would die at his hand, while my brother lay dying in a hospital bed. No, he could not have known it… but damn.
This is about as proper an outcome as I could wish for, short of an actual magic wand to make him never have happened in the first place. If he had been subject to USAian justice rather than Canadian, who knows?
Perhaps, but if Canadian mental institutions are as overloaded and overworked as their French counterparts, chances are there’s simply not enough room and resources to take him in.
@12 Cuttlefish:b
After all the trash he has spewed against PZ and against poll pharyngulation? Not a chance! :)
Re: stillcrazycanuck…
This is, what? The third time he’s been hauled into court for, basically, the same behavior? At what point is a Canadian judge allowed to declare that suspended-sentence-plus-probabtion-plus-medical-intervention isn’t working and at least slightly stronger measures are needed? What does it take to break the cycle of slap on the wrist with stern admonition followed by repeating the same activities that landed him there in the beginning?
Note that I am NOT calling for prison for the reasons you articulated. It wouldn’t work and might well exacerbate his condition. Having him out on his own supposedly under medical supervision isn’t working either. So what do YOU suggest could be fitted in between the extremes that will get his attention sufficiently to *change* his behavior in a meaningful way?
@17 “So what do YOU suggest could be fitted in between the extremes that will get his attention sufficiently to *change* his behavior in a meaningful way?”
Lets get him a job in Fox News. He would fit right in and nobody would be able to tell the difference!?
Reason #46153 why it’s bullshit when people say harrassment victims will get help from the police.
In Australia the criminals regard suspended sentences as “That’s great, I got away with it.”
I think it’s worth pointing out that plenty of people here have had personal direct experience with Markuze. Opinions are not necessarily based on news reporting.
I grant it’s quite possible that the judge knows something we don’t, but when you’ve gotten actual death threats from someone, who has also been willing to physically seek you out, and you see the courts yet again doing effectively nothing about it, it’s no surprise that you start getting a little testy.
If he’s that pathological about it, he’ll break the probation in one way or another and then he’ll get the sentence. Let him hang himself, it seems pretty likely he will.
Why should this be restricted to physical injury? Surely we all here know the profound psychological injury that can result from the sort of sustained harrassment Markuze goes in for. In this case, locking him up would certainly serve one good purpose: giving his victims a breathing space when they can be confident he will not be harrassing them.
Sure, that’s only natural, but there is a reason why we don’t allow the victims of criminals to be the arbiters of what should happen to them. In most countries where the death penalty has been abolished, it was done against the wishes of a majority of the general public (at the time).
Meanwhile, here in the US, parents who cheer on their children as they walk on stage at their graduation are being arrested:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/mississippi-superintendent-charges-graduation-cheering
Just to bring the US incarceration rate down to EU levels, we would have to empty and close more than 4 in every 5 prisons in the nation. I’ll heed Canada’s on this one.
What they regard as having happened is irrelevant.
I can’t even.
I agree with #14: this is a case that desperately needed some creative solutions, not some kind of bizarre punitive retribution, as some people seem to think I’m suggesting.
My exasperation is a result of the Montreal court basically, once again, washing their hands of him, doing nothing of any consequence, and sending him off with a gentle finger-wagging.
I will admit that the public exposure has inhibited him quite a bit, but I worry that it’s just that he’s shifted targets from me to someone else. Right now, I get an obscure rant from him every few months. For many years, it was multiple times every day. There was one time he was so obsessively spamming my comments that I could physically track him: he’d leave some pile of stupidity, I’d trace the IP address to some place in Montreal, temporarily block it, and 20 minutes later he’d have moved to a new internet cafe and spammed the same thing at me. And I’d block again, forcing him to move to a new computer or site. Over and over. For hours.
That’s a sick sad life. The courts aren’t helping him at all, and he really needs serious professional help.
My understanding is that a suspended sentence means that is suspended only if he complies with the terms. If he violates the terms, the sentence gets unsuspended ie. take your meds and therapy or else.
Re: #22 & #29…
You mean like the last two times that he violated the conditions the judge put him under?
Okay….so how many times does it take before the hammer comes down on him?
@PZ
One of the constraints of living in a society governed by law is that a Judge can only impose sanctions authorized by law I know, anecdotally, that some lower-level US judges impose idiosyncratic punishments on occasion, but that is merely one, and a minor, flaw in the US criminal justice system. In Canada, Judges tend to apply the law. That means that the Judge chooses from available options, based on the law, other cases, and the individual circumstances of the case, including the pre-sentence report. At the risk of over-simplification, the options available were pretty much limited to some version of the sentence imposed or incarceration. Since it seems that even here it is accepted that incarceration would not be a wise thing to do (likely making matters worse, rather than better in the long term, while also engaging in the imprisonment of the mentally ill due their non-violent conduct arising from that illness), I don’t think that the Court really had any alternative.
I am sure that the Judge wished that he or she could come up with and impose some ‘imaginative’ outcome that would prevent any significant risk of a re-offence. But Judges are not mental health professionals, and what we seem to know about this case is that the only mental health professional involved supported the sentence as the best option.
It is all too easy for people like us to sit here and criticize, and ask that someone, somewhere come up with an easy answer to the problems caused by mental illness. Nobody likes to be the target of the mentally ill: I know…I have been the target of an on and off campaign from one such for about 10 years now…..she recently started up again after a quiet period of several years. Not only does she email me, and phone my staff, using false names, but she has lodged complaints about me with the Law Society, the Provincial government, the Federal government, multiple levels of Court, the United Nations, various Commissions, and Amnesty International, to mention only part of it. She has a criminal record for causing a public disturbance and, for a while, was known to possess firearms (I am fairly sure she no longer has them). She is only the worst of a number of mentally ill people who have threatened me over the years. So nobody here has the right to tell me that I don’t understand that emails can hurt. I’ve had to brief staff about what to do should someone show up looking for me; the police have done likewise, and I’ve had to warn my wife.
None of that makes me want to see mentally ill people, cleared medically of being a credible physical threat, locked up. I feel sorry for the victims of the illness. In one case, that person (not the one described above) called me to express a true and detailed apology for her actions, at a time when she was in treatment. I wouldn’t wish her life on anyone and I don’t want such people jailed merely because they are a nuisance to me.
@31, stillacrazycanuck
There is a balance to be struck here. While, certainly, one should have empathy and understanding for people with mental illness and disability, it does them a disservice to excuse them from the consequences of their actions. There is a middle ground to be struck here: court ordered restriction of rights accompanied by direct personal care. That’s my job, working with people who suffer physical or mental disabilities. In the US at least, there are hundreds of thousands of individuals who, because of their disability, operate are varying levels of independence. Some live on their own and receive services a few times a week, some live in controlled group homes, and some fall somewhere in the middle. Many of these people have restrictions of various sorts that are imposed by court order (such as someone not being allowed to use the phone unsupervised because they call 911 fifteen times a day to report things like people walking outside or dogs barking). In addition, these programs exist to teach proper independent behavior (ranging from basic living skills, to proper social skills, to self-care and medication management) Perhaps Markuze would benefit from something like this, start him in a 24 hour site (either on his own or with a roommate), impose minor restrictions such as no unsupervised computer time, and work with him, eventually moving him to hourly services a few times a week. If the US and it’s terrible disability services programs can manage this, presumably Canada can as well.
And PZ has repeatedly disavowed any such thing, so what the fuck are you on about? You’ve been grinding this axe from your first post, while PZ has, over and over explained that he’s advocating no such thing. Isn’t it time you stopped tilting at windmills?
What’s being said is that maybe we should do something slightly more substantial than nothing at all. Given Markuze’s history of violating probations, giving him probation again is a loud and clear message of “Do whatever you want. We’re not going to stop you.”
So, how about an electronic leg thingamajig? How about, as Nerd suggested, key loggers on all his computers? These measures might ensure that if he behaves there’s minimal invasion, but if he violates the probation the authorities can quickly detect it and stop him. This neither requires him to be locked up for life, nor for him to freely harass people, as he has previously done.