Imagine you are out with your girlfriend for the evening.  You have a lovely time together and come home in the wee hours of the morning, only to find your front door wide open.  Your girlfriend’s mother lives with both of you so your concern for her safety immediately goes into overdrive.

This being Canada you’re not legally allowed to carry a firearm, so you run to the kitchen and arm yourself with a kitchen knife, the only defensive tool close at hand.  While you hear nothing, your girlfriend’s mother’s bedroom is upstairs and as you round the corner you stare in horror at what’s sitting at the bottom of the stairs.

In a bizarre twist your home invader has had the courtesy to take his shoes off before ransacking your home.

Running upstairs you discover the intruder hiding behind your girlfriend’s mother’s bedroom door.  He attacks you and you defend yourself with the knife you grabbed in the kitchen.  The home invader is injured in the struggle, seriously, but your girlfriend’s mother is safe and that’s all that matters.

God only knows what could have happened had you not arrived home when you did.

You call the police who come and arrest the home invader… and then they arrest you for the “crime” of assaulting the man who invaded your home.

Exactly what country is this again???

That’s precisely the question Moses Mahilal asked himself as he sat in a jail cell, under arrest for the “crime” of self-defense and defending the life of his loved ones.

This is a horror story we hear over and over across Canada, but never more often than from Ontario, where Crown prosecutors seem to despise anyone daring to actually defend themselves, despite the fact that self-defense is advocated in our Criminal Code.

First, there is the injustice of the victim of crime is the one charged with a criminal offense.  Then there is the criminal trial process, itself a punishment and humiliation, not to mention the hefty legal bill for a lawyer to prove you did nothing wrong.  Sadly, cases like this end up in court instead of the person being hailed as a hero for preventing some awful crime from being committed.

Moses Mahilal should be given a medal for what he did, not a massive legal bill.

Kino Johnson, the home invader who was wounded, freely admits that he is the one who is at fault. As Betsy Powell of the Toronto Star wrote:

Johnson has already admitted he was unlawfully inside the upscale home near Keele St. and Eglinton Ave. W. On June 28, he pleaded guilty in Ontario Superior Court to break and enter and two counts of possessing stolen property, including jewellery taken after he broke into an unoccupied Finch Ave. W. highrise apartment.

For his part, being almost killed has gotten through to Kino Johnson in a way that nothing else could.  Johnson has a lengthy criminal record already for robbery, theft and assault and his past criminal convictions didn’t have any impact on his life choices.

“I did almost lose my life, so the way I look at things is completely different. I wake up every morning and I give God thanks,” Johnson told Justice Mary Lou Benotto before being sentenced. “I want to be good to society and turn my life around.”

While I think it’s great that his near-death experience has made him want to turn his life around, I’m disgusted with Crown prosecutors who insist on sending the message to Canadians that self-defense will not be tolerated.  It’s obscene.

Even if Moses Mahilal is acquitted, and I pray to God that he will be, the very fact that he’s been charged is offensive to the very concept of our Rights and Freedoms under our Constitution.  The process is the punishment and there isn’t a shred of justice to be found anywhere in it.

Mahilal’s lawyer, Daniel Brown, agrees.  He is utterly baffled why the Crown is insisting on charging his client with a crime given that the actual criminal in this case has pleaded guilty and is currently incarcerated.

“We give people like this medals, not criminal records,” Brown said in an interview this week. The intruder “may have been armed or may have been violent or had accomplices. My client acted appropriately, under the circumstances.”

The way I see it the answer to the question of why Moses Mahilal is facing criminal charges is really quite simple.

Canadian police and Crown prosecutors don’t like citizens who have the audacity to defend themselves.  As a result of that wrongheaded attitude they feel compelled to send a message to Canadians in the hopes that we will meekly lie down like lambs for slaughter instead of doing the right thing as Moses Mahilal did, and protect his girlfriend’s mother with everything he had.

That’s called being a man, and that will not condoned by the Toronto Police Services or Ontario’s Crown prosecutors.

It’s unfortunate, if I dare be so understated.

Long gone are the days where we commended men for protecting their loved ones.  Now we insist on tossing them in jail instead of holding them up as wonderful examples of how a man should act.

Society as a whole loses out when we prosecute the victims of crime, and faith in both the police and our justice system plummet.

That’s the unintended consequence of the great Nanny State though… honour,  dignity and manhood are despised while injustice and ingratitude abound.

It’s another sad day for Canada, for Canadians and for our shredded Rights and Freedoms…