Skip to content

If you can’t learn, you’re gone

So Judge Harry Bridges “made a mistake, a terrible mistake” when he ruled that Gary Mattson is a dangerous offender.
Our_View_March_2009
Array

So Judge Harry Bridges “made a mistake, a terrible mistake” when he ruled that Gary Mattson is a dangerous offender.

Mattson’s lawyer, Naeem Rauf, says he will recommend an appeal, saying it isn’t right “to throw a life away over something that happened over a minute or two.”

Never mind that the minute or two in question was a brutal public attack on an Edmonton Transit bus driver, which included punching the driver unconscious, dragging his limp body out of the bus, stomping him on the head 14 times and kicking him in the throat, before running off.

If you’re looking for a “terrible mistake,” that might qualify. But it would only be the most recent of many in Mattson’s life.

His victim, Tom Bregg, was left unrecognizable in a pool of blood and near death, with fractures to his facial bones, his left eye destroyed and severe traumatic brain injury.

Rauf holds that Mattson does not fit the definition of a dangerous offender — someone who cannot be allowed in society because of his high risk to re-offend, combined with a demonstrated disregard for the consequences of his actions. After all, in all his other six assault convictions, impaired driving convictions, mischief and breaches of court orders, Mattson never received more than a 90-day sentence. To go from 90 days to seven-years-to-whenever is too big a leap, he says.

From someone with experience with violent crime by a repeat offender, let us bring Rauf up to speed on the purpose of sentencing. His earlier sentences were warnings that bullying and violence are not acceptable, and that authorities exist to protect the innocent. Lessons Mattson did not learn.

Mattson is a demonstrably violent person. He had an abusive upbringing that led him to drinking and marijuana abuse by age 10, from which time he was known for impulsive, threatening and violent behaviour. That’s a matter of record.

Mattson admitted he could recognize that stomping someone’s face into a pulp is wrong (in the context of having a fight). But by his own words he showed he could not empathize at all with how his victim might feel after such an attack. That, too, is a matter of record.

As is his criminal record, where repeated rounds of “consequences” failed to instruct Mattson that something in his life needed changing.

Perhaps Mattson can indeed change his life. He has seven years, minimum, to do just that. After that, he must convince authorities that he has discovered a conscience and can reliably resolve never to harm people again. Otherwise, we’re all better off if he never again sees sunrise as a free man.

From someone with experience in the field of brain injury, Bregg, the bus driver, will never be free again. Likewise, it will be very difficult for his family and close friends to rebuild their lives. There will be nightmares, flashes of violent imagery or anxiety; there will be times when they will wonder if they are losing their minds. This could last for years. That’s if they are normal, psychologically healthy people.

Rauf says the consequences of a dangerous offender ruling are too high, given Mattson’s record. That began with Mattson, tears in his eyes and his mother weeping in the courtroom, asking to be allowed out of the courtroom. News reports told of an anguished scream coming through the door after he left.

Consequences? Remorse? Or a disbelieving “how-could-this-happen-to-me?” We have seven years or more to find out.

In the meantime, if Rauf wants to file an appeal, that’s fine.

Let him tell us again how a bad upbringing explains why Mattson is not really dangerous, just in need of some rehab. And a judge of Harry Bridges’ stature will tell him no dice.

Greg Neiman is an Advocate editor.