Beyond Redemption: The People vs Lucas and Bender
by John D Montgomery
Winnipeg, MB: Watson & Dwyer, 2004
144 pp., $18
Authored by ex-Manitoba Crown prosecutor John D. Montgomery, Beyond Redemption: The People vs Lucas and Bender, is a cri de coeur, a j’accuse. Montgomery lambastes justice officials for their “leniency” toward two murderers, convicted of an atrocious axe-slaying in 1974, who, despite receiving 20-years-without-parole sentences, still found means to commit fresh, deadly violence. I review this 2004 book because one of the two offenders, Mr. Dwight Douglas Lucas, has contacted me to complain about Montgomery’s characterization of him, which is—yes—scathing.
In his prosecutorial judgment, Montgomery classes the convicted Lucas of 1974 and 1975—as, first, a teenage/punk-killer and then, decades later, as a seasoned manipulator of parole officials and social workers, as a con-man who has never repented of his callous role in the deaths of two innocents—one man by axe, one woman by accident. The prosecutor doubts that most convicts can ever be rehabilitated; all their talk of change is fraudulent: “Lucas (is) cunning enough to contain his cockiness”; he is, forever, for Montgomery, a “posturing axe-murderer.” Montgomery is clear: The problem with the convictions (that he personally achieved) in “Regina v. Lucas and Bender” is that bureaucrats—who “pamper” inmates—worked to ease the strict sentences.
Montgomery believes that Canada’s “once-respected system of criminal justice” deserves his “abusive denunciation” and “cheerless political assassination” because “bleeding-heart” do-gooders “make a mockery of justice.” He even thinks that the allegedly “escalating crime in this country of ours” is due to “naïve” bumblers crying over incarcerated, cold-blooded killers. Montgomery must have been a fearsome prosecutor. His subjects didn’t just murder their victim, “They butchered him alive.” They are also “psychopaths,” “a pair of pigs in the Temple of Justice.” If Jack Wayne Bender is “the uncrowned king of crudity” (thanks to his “sewer-mouth”), then Lucas is “the undisputed crown prince.”
When one witness felt Lucas resembled “a much younger Sammy Davis, Jr.” (the late African-American entertainer), Montgomery writes, “The likeness was striking; the comparison vital but odious.” Is there a racial tinge in Montgomery’s treatment of Lucas? He is described as “the black-billed magpie,” but Bender is cast as “the prototypical hyena.” When inmate Bender weds and has a conjugal visit, Montgomery terms it a “boudoir farce” and “tragicomic intertwine.” Although he never states it forthrightly, Montgomery seems to favour the death penalty: Execution would eliminate the problem of repeat-murderers. He does say that he “never could drum up much Christian charity” for Lucas, and maybe he’s right. Yet, when Lucas bloodied his hands 35 years ago, he was a boy. Should he have been hanged—as we almost hanged the innocent, but wrongfully convicted, Steven Truscott, who was sent to death row at the age of 14?
Montgomery admits that rehabilitation is possible: “I know that convicts can be reformed.” But how can one tell which once-youthful thug will emerge from prison, years and decades later, reformed enough to be deemed a “model citizen”? Montgomery doesn’t know, nor does anyone. Our choices are stark: Lock murderers up forever (or hang em high) or allow “faint hope” and provide rehab programs. Montgomery is correct to argue that some “savage bastards” should be incarcerated for good (a fate meted out to Paul Bernardo, but not his then-accomplice and murderess-wife, Karla Homolka). How do we select these convicts?
Though Montgomery’s prose is purple-faced, we need to hew to facts: 1) the crime rate is falling—not because we’re angels, but because we’re aging; 2) prison suicide and violence rates are increasing; 3) we’re building more prisons which means we will “need” more criminals; 4) we punish alleyway thugs and shopping-mall thieves, but the crooks who loot seniors of their pensions get to laugh all the way to their tax havens.
As for Lucas feeling hurt by Montgomery’s words, it is good that he has feelings. Perhaps now, in his fifties, Lucas extends to others the sympathy, empathy, compassion, and caring that he failed to muster as a youth.
*Some of these reviews first appeared in The Chronicle Herald, Halifax.
