International Law

Murderabilia

This is going too far:

Corrections Canada has been ordered to review the Internet-based auction of prison artwork by a convicted killer.

Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day asked the commissioner of the prisons agency to look into the case involving Roch Theriault, now serving a life sentence in New Brunswick for a brutal murder.

The Canadian Press reported Sunday that more than half a dozen items by Theriault, including oil paintings, pastels, handprint’s and poems, have turned up on the U.S. website MurderAuction.com.

The site treats killers as celebrities, and offers collectors a chance to bid on a range of items, from toenail clippings to framed oil paintings. Critics denounce the trade as “murderabilia.”

“Minister Day is concerned . . . that an individual would consider making profit out of a heinous crime,” spokesperson Melisa Leclerc said in a statement yesterday.

Theriault ran a bizarre religious cult near Burnt River, Ont., from 1977 to 1989, which attracted up to a dozen adults and twice as many children.

Charismatic and brutal, Theriault chopped off the hand of one concubine and disembowelled his wife.

The art being auctioned is abstract or contains inoffensive images such as flowers, and dates from October and November 2007.

Minimum bids in U.S. funds range from $20 to $500.

Gabrielle Lavallee, a former cult member whose hand and arm were severed by Theriault, had not seen the website but said yesterday she was horrified.

“I think it’s horrible because … Theriault and other people like him, they make money on the victims’ back and I think it’s awful,” she said in an interview from her home in Chicoutimi, Que.

Calling the memorabilia auction “unfair, awful, unacceptable,” Lavallee, 58, said she is being victimized by “a legal system that seems to give more importance (to) criminals’ rights than victims’ rights.”

Lavallee, who last saw her abuser in 2002 when she argued against parole, called on Corrections Canada to halt the flow of Theriault’s artwork and other crime memorabilia from Dorchester Penitentiary.

I was going to give a link to the website doing this (which is what you normally do on a blog), but . . . no.

Full post as published by Criminal Review on March 11, 2008 (boomark / email).