 Craig Munro is taken into custody for the murder in 1980 of Toronto Const. Michael Sweet. (QMI Agency, file)
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TORONTO -- Within a few hours, allowing for the time difference between here and British Columbia, Toronto cop-killer Craig Munro will find himself standing before a parole tribunal for the second time in a year.
By now, he will have likely been transferred from the minimum-security Kwikwexwelhp Healing Village in a remote mountain setting 37 km east of Mission, B.C. — having either invented Metis ancestry or adopted its culture — to a hearing room Tuesday within the Mountain Institution in nearby Agassiz, B.C.
It will be a nice little road trip.
Thirty years ago Sunday, Craig Munro, now 59, shot and wounded Toronto Police Const. Michael Sweet, 30 — and then let him bleed out during a 90-minute standoff, despite the pleas for mercy from the young father of three girls — when he and his younger brother, Jamie Munro, botched a robbery of the Bourbon Street Bistro on Queen St. W.
It was a murder so brutal and so heartless that it threw Toronto into shock.
Craig Munro got life for first-degree murder, the noose only a few years off the books, while Jamie Munro was convicted of second-degree murder, did his time, and then skipped off to Italy following his parole in 1992.
There will be a crowd waiting for Craig Munro Tuesday to nix his bid for release, and condemn the system that allows a convicted cop killer — or any first-degree murderer — to force his surviving victims to undergo what the law now allows to be annual applications for parole.
There will be Tim Danson, the Toronto lawyer helping represent the Sweet family. There will be Karen Fraser, the wife of Michael Sweet, widowed at age 29 with three young girls under the age of six, with her daughters Jennifer Sweet, Nicole Sweet and Linda Fraser. There will be Michael Sweet’s brothers, Charlie and John, and his sister, Pat Corcoran.
There will be Staff-Supt. Tony Corrie of the Toronto Police Service, Doug Corrigan, vice-president of the Toronto Police Association, and OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino who, back in the day, was one of the Toronto homicide cops who helped convict the Munro brothers and whose autobiography, Duty, leaves little doubt of the impact Sweet’s murder.
Back in Toronto, meanwhile, in a room within the National Parole Board’s offices here, others will be joining the hearing via video link. There will be Kim Sweet, Michael Sweet’s middle daughter, and Sweet’s sister, Ann Parker. Also in attendance will be Mike McCormack, president of the Toronto Police Association.
But no press.
Besides the legally-enabled audacity of being able to push for parole after only a year following a resounding rejection, there are a number of troubling aspects about this supposedly transparent public parole hearing.
The first is that the victims have no right to peruse Craig Munro’s prison file, no right to see how he has behaved while behind bars, no right to know what therapies he has either undergone or rejected, and therefore no right to know the risk his still presents.
Yet he gets to sit there, year-after-year if necessary, to listen as his victims share their pain and life story in order to keep him away from the public.
“Craig Munro has a choice,” Toronto Police union boss Mike McCormack tells the Sun. “He can stay in jail and serve out his life sentence, in which case he can assert his privacy rights over his prison file and keep it from the general public, or he can seek his freedom.
“But the moment he seeks his freedom by asking the parole board to release him into the community, this becomes a public issue, not a private issue, and he should not be allowed to hide behind the Privacy Act to keep such important information from the public,” says McCormack.
“The law has to change.
“To my way of thinking, offenders like Craig Munro, who are convicted of murdering a police officer, lose certain rights. It is the public who is at risk if Munro is paroled, and the public has the right to know what is in his prison files,” says McCormack.
“How else can the public determine whether the parole board and Corrections Canada are doing their jobs properly?”
And then there is the issue of the media which, in principle, represents the eyes of the public.
While a member of the press can apply to attend any parole hearing — and rarely be rejected — it is barred from sitting in the room where there is a video link.
In other words, I could have flown to Vancouver yesterday, rented a car, driven to Mountain Institute, and sat in on Munro’s parole hearing because I passed the screening process, and exist on NPB record as an interested party.
But I am barred from virtually walking across the street in downtown Toronto and sitting in the room where there is a video connection to the parole hearing.
“That link and that room is for victims only, not the media,” said Ontario parole board media spokesman Carol Sparling.
“There are no exceptions.”
This troubles the Sweets’ lawyer, Tim Danson, and should trouble all media organizations.
“Transparency is the hallmark of our justice system and our democracy,” he says. “It would be unthinkable to close the courts to the general public on the basis that we should simply trust the judges and the lawyers to do the right thing.
“Not only does that risk a serious miscarriage of justice, it stifles public debate.
“In principle, it is difficult to appreciate that a parole hearing should be treated any differently.
“More disturbing, why should a person convicted of murdering a police officer have more rights than ordinary litigants?” asks Danson.
“Parole hearings should be open to the public, and the public is entitled to know what is before the parole board when is determines risk factors.”
mark.bonokoski@sunmedia.ca
or 416-947-2445
