Life sentence for Betty K?

Something has gone terribly wrong here.

Betty Krawczyk was 65 years old when she went to jail for Clayoquot Sound. It was her first time ever in prison.

She went to jail again at age 78 for standing in front of bulldozers in 2006 to protest the building of the Sea-to-Sky Highway through the Eagleridge Bluffs in West Vancouver for the 2010 Olympics.

"There will be no logging here today," she said.

That time a court injunction also specified that she stay away from the bluffs. She didn't stay away and back to prison she went for another 10 months, this time for disobeying the court.

Somehow, instead of receiving the Order of Canada for her courage, Betty is now up to eight prison sentences - eight! - without this environmental hero and grandmother of eight having ever harmed a single person or piece of logging or construction equipment.
She shows up, she stands up for her beliefs, she gets arrested.

Her real crime in the eyes of the courts is that she challenges the legitimacy of the judicial system to criminalize dissent, to punish protesting :

"I won’t do community service should that be part of my sentence. I have done community service all of my life and I have done it for love. I refuse to have community service imposed on me as a punishment. And I won’t pay a fine or allow anyone else to pay a fine for me. I won’t accept any part of electronic monitoring as I would consider that an enforced internalization of a guilt I don’t feel and don’t accept and I refuse to internalize this court’s opinion of me by policing myself."

Back to jail for Betty K.

After serving out her last sentence in full, Betty appealed it on the grounds that the squelching of protest inconvenient to corporations and governments is an illegitimate use of the legal system.
The Attorney General's response to her appeal has been to cite a case ruling for chronic offenders, recommending that the court re-sentence her under the rules of "accumulated convictions", and lock her up for life:

"When an accused has been convicted of a serious crime in itself calling for a substantial sentence and when he suffers from some mental or personalty disorder rendering him a danger to the community but not subjecting him to confinement in a mental institution and when it is uncertain when, if ever, the accused will be cured of his affliction, in my opinion the appropriate sentence is one of life."

"A serious crime"? "A mental or personality disorder"? "A danger to the community"?
"Life" ? For an appeal to a sentence she has already served?

Good God.

Shame on you, Michael Brundrett of the Attorney General's Office.

It was extraordinary enough that a provincial government now happy to take credit for having "saved" Clayoquot Sound was willing to imprison for two and a half years a person prominently responsible for having forced them to save it. It is beyond heinous that they should now attempt to rebrand her fight for social justice and responsible environmental practices some sort of "mental disorder" worthy of a life sentence.

Betty's appeal will be heard this Wednesday Sept 22nd at 10am at the Court House, 800 Smithe St., Vancouver. She is asking for your support at a rally at 9:30am on the back steps of the Court House at Howe and Robson just before the hearing.

Please come. If you can't, write or email a letter to your local paper, your MLA.
Anything will do - the important thing is to let them know you are watching.

Betty, now 82, is willing to go to prison for her beliefs; please take a few moments to write a letter to stand up for yours.

Thank you.

Update : Orwell's Bastard has an idea.

Dr.Dawg adds: The BC Attorney General's office is taking a leaf from a very old Soviet playbook.

UPDATE: (September 23) Some further developments, including a retreat by the Crown.

BP gets 10 new deepwater drilling leases in the Gulf

While waiting for the six month moratorium on granting new permits for offshore wells deeper than 500 feet to be lifted, the Department of Interior's Minerals Management Services, these guys, have approved five new offshore drilling projects since June 2.
An Exxon Mobil site at a water depth of 1,000 feet and a Marathon Oil site at 775 feet were approved with waivers exempting them from detailed studies of their environmental impact.
A Chevron site 6,730 feet underwater and an Exxon site at 6,943 feet were approved after subjecting them to environmental reviews.
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The MMS has approved 198 new deepwater leases - the step before the submission of drilling plans - in the central Gulf since the BP spill began.
According to Defenders of Wildlife and the Southern Environmental Law Center, of the 198 deepwater leases sold, 92 lease tracts are at deeper depths than the Deepwater Horizon well and at least 10 are owned by BP and are located over a mile deep.
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Lease Sale 213 covers 36 million acres in the central Gulf off the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

If federal regulators opt to cancel a lease once it's issued, the government must repay the company the fair market value of the lease or compensate it for the cost of its bid plus interest.

So the Department of the Interior approves the leases, and then either the company gets to go ahead and drill or the taxpayer pays them not to ... with interest.
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Pocket change you can believe in.

BP oil spill at your house

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If it was my home uses Google Maps and the current situation of the spill to show what the extent of the disaster would look like in your neck of the woods. Click and it will find you.
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The Exxon Valdez spill of 1989 was 41 million litres of oil. It can still be found under the sand.
US government scientists are now pegging the Gulf Oil disaster at an Exxon Valdez-size spill every 5 to 13 days, with more oil gushing into the sea in an hour than officials originally said was spilling in an entire day.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute estimates the spill at 3.8 million litres to 8 million litres per day.
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The Montreal Gazette reports that after a 16% dip on the NYSE Wednesday due to "concerns over BP's ability to meet mounting costs", shares rebounded by more than 12% yesterday "partly because of speculation that Petro-China, Asia's top oil and gas firm, was considering making a bid for BP."
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Meanwhile here in Canada, one of the provisions in the just-passed budget gives the environment minister the power to bypass environmental assessments on major projects he wants passed just as Enbridge insists it wants its Northern Gateway pipeline shipping tankers of tarsands oil to Asia via the BC port of Kitimat by 2016.

Last year Natural Resources Canada - Review of the Federal Moratorium on Oil and Gas Activities Offshore British Columbia was quietly amended with an "Errata" that read :

"the moratorium on oil and gas activities offshore British Columbia does not apply to tanker traffic"

and as regards the grandfathered BC offshore drilling exploration agreements awaiting negotiation and approval :

"The decision not to negotiate with industry to convert those permits is a pure policy decision. There is no statutory impediment to carrying out those negotiations."

If it was my home ...

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