Guilt, money, morality

Editorial

The issue of financial compensation for injustice has been a cause for immense controversy in the past several decades.

In a story the Independent ran June 11 about Israel's economic miracle, Paul Rivlin, a Tel Aviv University economist, spoke of the profoundly painful experience surrounding the reparations agreement between Germany and Israel in the 1950s.

The issue arose in September 1951, when West Germany's chancellor Konrad Adenauer addressed the Bundestag, calling for a compensation package based on material claims of Jewish victims of the Nazi regime.

"... [U]nspeakable crimes have been committed in the name of the German people," said Adenauer, "The federal government are prepared, jointly with representatives of Jewry and the state of Israel ... to bring about a solution of the material indemnity problem, thus easing the way to the spiritual settlement of infinite suffering."

He must have known, of course, that a spiritual settlement of the suffering was impossible. What is done can never be undone. The offer of compensation was a recognition only of the stolen Jewish assets and slave labor during the Nazi period. A financial price on human suffering would have been, presumably, an impossible and immoral accounting, with a sum too dear for any country's treasury to meet.

But, as Rivlin pointed out and as Israel's then-prime minister David Ben-Gurion knew, the funds were desperately needed by a nascent Israel struggling to pay for its costly War of Independence and the costs of absorbing the olim (immigrants), a great many of whom were victims of the Holocaust. Despite massive protests and riots that left 200 protesters and 140 Israeli police officers injured, the Knesset approved the agreement and, as Rivlin noted, this moment can account to a significant degree for the economic success Israel has experienced in the past 50-odd years.

The idea of financial compensation for victimization remains controversial among the public worldwide, but has been accepted, to a large extent, as the only tangible way to apologize. In Canada, compensation packages for the wrongly convicted or otherwise victimized have become, if not commonplace, at least a part of government policy.

Just this month, the five-decade mockery of justice surrounding the murder conviction of Steven Truscott came to what may be its end with a $6.5 million package from the government of Ontario.

Several books have been written on this case and they tell a story of an incongruously idyllic Ontario childhood upended in 1959 by a false accusation, charge and conviction of murder. The 14-year-old Truscott had given a handlebar ride to 12-year-old Lynne Harper in the southern Ontario military town of Clinton. That night, Harper was found dead, having been raped and strangled. Truscott was arrested, convicted and sentenced to hang.

Truscott maintained his innocence through a decades-long judicial nightmare. His death sentence was eventually commuted, but he spent a decade in a penitentiary, followed by a further five years on parole and 30 more living under an assumed name, seeking to clear his record. In 2004, Irwin Cotler, justice minister at the time, ordered a review of new evidence and, in 2007, Truscott was acquitted by the Ontario Court of Appeal.

The acquittal was not complete, however. The court declared it could not find Truscott guilty within a reasonable doubt, but did not declare him innocent of the crime. Indeed, the victim's family, despite the half-century of intervention and the mountain of evidence, remains bitter. This month, in reaction to the award, the brother of the victim declared the financial compensation "a real travesty," a statement that amounts to a repetition of the guilt accusation.

Nevertheless, official Canada has recognized Truscott's wrongful imprisonment and attempted, in what small way it can, to make recompense.

At the same time, there is the matter of comparative compensation. David Milgaard, whose case is eerily reminiscent of Truscott's, and Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was apprehended by American customs agents (the possible complicity of the Canadian government is being currently investigated), each received $10 million. This sort of incongruity is but one of the moral challenges of placing financial value on victimhood.

The cases are each unique and certainly nothing can compare to the atrocities of the Holocaust. But just as the compensation to Israel for material claims during the Holocaust allowed Israel to flourish economically, these compensation packages may allow these individuals, whose lives have been intersected by massive injustice, to accomplish some things in their later lives that would otherwise not have been possible. There is also much to be said for these payments, from Germany's parliament and from Canadian courts, as a societal statement of remorse. If nothing else, the money should allow the recipients to live a more carefree existence – the sort of life that for Truscott was halted in 1959 with a false accusation of murder.

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