Officials get ready for Homolka's big day
Joliette courthouse beefs up security before infamous prisoner's public debutBy INGRID PERITZ
Tuesday, May 31, 2005 Page A3
MONTREAL -- A metal detector is being installed. Extra courthouse constables are being called in to keep order. In two days, Canada's most infamous female prisoner shows her very famous face in public for the first time in a dozen years.
And Quebec officials are girding for the fallout.
The day after tomorrow, Karla Homolka is scheduled to take her seat in a wood-panelled prisoner's box in Room 1.05 at the provincial courthouse in Joliette, Que.
This will be her first appearance in public since she was sent to jail for the monstrous killings of two Ontario schoolgirls in 1993.
Her re-emergence is already raising passions across Canada. And it's causing a security headache in Joliette, a pleasant city of 17,800 in Quebec farm country, 60 kilometres northeast of Montreal.
The only hotel in town is almost fully booked, and judicial officials are fielding calls from media from across Canada and even the United States.
Preparing for the anticipated crush, officials have opened a second courtroom that will carry Ms. Homolka's hearing on a large-screen television.
"Security will be increased, given the scope this is taking," said Pierre-Bernard Raymond, acting director of services for the Joliette courthouse.
"We're take all the measures necessary to ensure security. We get the impression this is going to be big."
As for the metal detector, it raises the question of whom it's protecting.
Officials wouldn't go into details, but Ms. Homolka has been the subject of death betting pools on the Internet.
The court appearance unofficially launches the countdown to her release from Joliette's prison for women in five weeks time.
Specifically, the court will hear a controversial application by Ontario to impose restrictions on her life after she's finished her sentence.
The Ontario Attorney-General is invoking Section 810 of the Criminal Code, which allows the courts to impose restrictions, such as curfews or limits on associations with other people, if there are reasonable grounds to fear a released inmate may commit a crime.
Two veteran Ontario prosecutors, James Ramsay and Howard Leibovich, will be joined by Quebec prosecutor Claude Lachapelle in presenting Ontario's case.
The person weighing their arguments, and deciding what form Ms. Homolka's post-prison life may take, is Quebec Court Judge Jean Beaulieu.
It is not known whether Ms. Homolka will fight Ontario's application. Reached at her office yesterday, Ms. Homolka's lawyer, Sylvie Bordelais, would not disclose her plans.
"I know what I'm going to do but I won't talk about it," she said.
The Attorney-General's measure is being greeted with some skepticism in legal circles, because of the perception it's an attempt to rewrite Ms. Homolka's infamous 1993 plea bargain struck with prosecutors, in exchange for testimony against her husband.
"We don't give the mark of Cain on someone in Canada," said Ron Sklar, a professor of criminal and Charter law at McGill University in Montreal.
He said prosecutors will have to provide specific allegations that Ms. Homolka presents a threat to society.
"We all have to realize that she has certain rights, otherwise we're punishing her for the crime she committed in the past," Prof. Sklar said.
"She's already paid her debt to society. We can't continue to punish her. That would conflict with giving her a second chance, which is one of our principles of fairness."
That being said, he underscored all Canadians' apprehensiveness about her imminent release.
Prof. Sklar lives in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, the middle-class Montreal neighbourhood where Ms. Homolka is said to be considering settling.
"If I had teenage girls still living at home," said the father of two daughters in their 30s, "and she lived on the same
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