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Joseph Fournier, 17, readily coughed up the dough in the cash register.
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After all, he was just a gas station attendant working his way through high school.
But that night in October 1974 in Lawrence, Mass., his cooperation with a thug named William Horton and two accomplices didn’t matter. Horton — later better known as Willie — stabbed the boy 19 times, then stuffed his body in a trash can.
Willie was hammered with life without parole. But the angels of the caring professions sprung Willie on a weekend furlough in 1986 — and he disappeared.
Until April 3, 1987, when he arrived in Oxon Hill, Md., Horton then twice raped a woman after pistol-whipping, stabbing, binding, and gagging her fiancé. A cop’s bullet ended his run.
He was sentenced to two CONSECUTIVE life terms and, uh, here’s another 85 years just in case. Maryland would not be returning Horton to Massachusetts.
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“I’m not prepared to take the chance that Mr. Horton might again be furloughed or otherwise released. This man should never draw a breath of free air again,” Judge Vincent J. Femia said.
But in the 1988 presidential election between Republican George H.W. Bush and Democrat Michael Dukakis, Horton had his star turn. Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts then and later torpedoed the program but by then, it was too late.
American cities had turned into shooting galleries by 1988 as crack gangs unleashed homicide on an epic scale. The GOP latched onto Horton as emblematic of everything wrong with the justice system.
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Horton figuratively murdered Dukakis’ presidential campaign the same way he murdered Joseph Fournier.
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Bush campaign manager, Lee Atwater joked: “By the time we’re finished, they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’s running mate.”
Dukakis wasn’t particularly soft on crime but Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau certainly is.
In this country, we have Willie Hortons several times a day. Every day. A quick perusal of police blotters from Vancouver to Buena Vista confirms this.
The agonizing question quivering on the lips of the police and public is this: What’s this guy doing out?
Last week, a “deeply disturbed” criminal justice system frequent flier allegedly slashed a stranger’s hand off and minutes later murdered another man he had never met. He had been arrested 60 times.
“Rehabilitation — at all costs — is the federal government’s mantra; they are ideologically wedded to that premise,” one defence lawyer told me several years ago. “As for the victims and their families, they are definitely an afterthought.
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“The sole focus for this government is on the offender.”
Last week, Ottawa’s very own Donald Musselman was the beneficiary of Canada’s new judicial order. When he was 18, Musselman shot to death a father in the ByWard Market.
While he was caged, he beat a fellow jailbird to death.
Musselman got a life sentence with no chance of parole for 12 years for the murder in the market. He pleaded out to manslaughter in the jailhouse beating. After the second death, it is unlikely he’ll get parole after 12 years but, hey, this is Canada and anything is possible.
As I said, it’s no secret Canada is soft on crime. Even criminals know it. They breach again and again and again, and there are no consequences — except to the victim.
Willie Horton is already in the house for Trudeau, but we simply can’t keep track of every outrage and fumble in the criminal justice file.
That tally will surely be squared on election day.
Horton himself — who always insisted his name was William — is now 73 and banged up at the Jessup Correctional Insitute in Maryland.
@HunterTOSun
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