One of Robert Dziekanski’s killers finally ran out of luck this week. He now has a criminal conviction—even if it’s for a different matter entirely, one that I first blogged about here, and much later here.
Nevertheless, the public should probably count its blessings.
Briefly, a drunken RCMP Corporal Monty Robinson, one of the four Dziekanski Tasermen, went on to run down and kill a motorcyclist. He did not stop to administer first aid to his dying victim, but dashed home, downed a few to give himself an alibi, and was charged—not with DUI, but with the lesser crime obstruction of justice.
Corporal Robinson is clearly a liar as well as a killer. But, despite being under the wing of the system, he couldn’t manage to slip free of this one. It took three and a half years, but he was convicted, and it looks as though he may lose his job. At some point even the RCMP has to cut its losses.
Meanwhile, after a video that’s been around the world a few times, and an expensive inquiry into the death of would-be immigrant Dziekanski, he and his three co-killers have yet to come to trial—for perjury, the only crime with which the BC Attorney General’s Criminal Justice Branch saw fit to charge them.
We mustn’t call Robinson’s conviction justice. It falls several light-years short of that. But I suppose we should all be grateful for small mercies, given the culture of impunity that exists from coast to coast to coast when cops go wild. This time the Man got the Mountie. One down; three to go.