The Ben Mulroney Show - Court Rules a Man is Free to Sexually Assault Kids

Episode Date: July 9, 2026

The Alberta Court of Appeal ruled that a deaf man named Kendall Longclaws cannot be tried for sex crimes against three minors, and upheld a 2025 lower court ruling. The man never learned to communicate. The courts decided it is a violation of his Charter rights to put him on trial, or even assess his mental fitness for trial. National Post writer and commentator Jamie Sarkonak joins Ben to unpack this legal and moral minefield. If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠   Executive Producer:  Mike Drolet Reach out to Mike with story ideas or tips at [e-mail] Enjoy   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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to your match day lineup. Jameson, it's what you bring. Please enjoy our products responsibly. You're listening to the Van Mulroney show. You would think the amount of news that I consume that I would be able to look you in the eye right now and say I've seen it all. I've seen it all.

There's nothing else to see. It's just a repeat, a retread, a variation, a sequel. Everything is something we've already seen. Well, strap in because if you haven't read Jamie Sarkonix's recent piece in the National Post, I urge you to because this is a story. I promise you, you ain't heard anything like this ever before. Jamie, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.

This one is just, I don't even know what to make of this. We'll get to the ruling later, but tell everybody the crux of the story. Tell us about the individual concern, the crimes. that were committed and then we'll get into the ruling. Well, in Alberta last year, there was a very bizarre trial that came out of the court of Kings bench involving a man named Kendall Long Clause. The catch was that he could not communicate at all. So he had grown up on a farm quite isolated.

He had seven siblings about, yeah, seven siblings. And he was deaf. And his parents were never able to get him education to communicate. in nonverbal means. And they tried taking him to school a couple times, didn't work. They tried getting him tutoring. That didn't work. So by around age 30, he found himself in a position where he was being charged with

three or sexual crimes against three individuals, a number of sex crime counts. And instead of taking this all the way to trial, the judge said, we're just going to stay the charges because there's no way we can respect this man's charge. and have a trial. So the solution was just to put the charges in the garbage and not even start to consider the allegations that were brought by the victims. So we've got to stop there for a second. And we got to you got to explain to me and explain to the listeners.

What about going to trial would have been a violation of his charter rights? So on one hand, the judge said this would violate. his language rights because he needed an interpreter, but there was nothing to interpret into. So this is very paradoxical, and this is something I think people are very free to disagree with. Because, you know, to trial in English, we don't have a right to a trial in nothing. Yeah. Yeah. And that was one. And then on the other hand, the prosecutor brought an alternative of suggestion. He said, well, let's just see if he's mentally fit to stand trial. Right. If he's found mentally unfit, that means that this individual would have to a mental

hospital and be subject to the province's psychiatric administration regime. So that can mean years of detention or it can mean just months. But they have to go in the hospital, fix whatever is wrong, maybe get released later. Yeah. That requires an assessment. The judge said even the assessment would violate his charter right to liberty because he can't communicate with the assessor. So yeah, they just threw the charges in the garbage. Okay, so that was it. And when I heard the judge said, while the result is unsatisfactory to all involved,

there is simply no other remedy available. And am I wrong, Jamie, for saying that, I'm sorry, not good enough. You don't get to wear the robes and you don't get to sit in the high chair and you don't get the deference afforded to a judge. If you look at in your learned legal esteem, you look at the legal framework and say, yeah, there's nothing we can do here. So to the three accusers of what is a terrible traumatic violation, you're denied justice. Sorry, there's nothing we can do. Am I wrong for thinking yet not good enough? Go back to the drawing board and come back with something better. Yeah, I would say that's entirely reasonable.

reasonable because you look at a situation like this and the charter has, you know, it has various remedies. So if someone's charter rights can't be respected perfectly, that's something that the judge can handle later on in the trial. In this case, the judge said, we're not even going to have that discussion. We're just going to not open up any of the evidence or any of the allegations. So that's crazy. And then you might think, well, at least there's an appeal court. maybe a few judges higher up, we'll look at this and say, yeah, this is crazy. We're not doing this. But it went to appeal and just very recently a panel of three appeal judges in Alberta took a look at it and said, no, we agree with the trial judge. This is correct. We can't do anything about it. Sorry.

So that's how it stands in Alberta. This is legitimate law in Alberta when you're handling this kind of situation. and we might be able to take it to the Supreme Court and see what the Supreme Court says. This, yeah, I get, I get. It is a real situation that can happen in law now. I get that this is a difficult case, but we're not handing it to first year law students, legal students, where that if it were me and I've been in first year law,

I was like, well, I can't come up with a solution, but I'm not a judge. I have been elevated to that, to that what is supposed to be, you know, somebody who knows. how to navigate both the letter and the spirit of the law and somebody who appreciates what the legal, like what our legal and judiciary system is supposed to be about. Because it's not just about punishment. It's about, it can be about restitution.

It can be about sending a signal. It can be about all sorts of stuff. It should be about justice for the victims ultimately. But it feels yet again like we're telling a story where sort of a common through line is in a battle. It's a toss up between the rights of the victim and the rights of the person who perpetrated the alleged crime. We're going to come out. We're going to err on the side of the alleged criminal and we're going to back it up with the charter.

It feels like that is a common theme in Canada right now. Very much so. And this is perhaps one of the worst cases of that period because we're not even giving him a sentence discount because there have been very absurd sentence discounts, you know, looking at whatever circumstance of the offender, that makes it worth taking two years off his jail sentence. We did not even get that far. You know, we didn't even test if he did the things that he was alleged to have done. And then we released him back into the community.

We said there's no way we can legally take him out of society because that's what this is ultimately for, is safety. You know, maybe he belongs in jail or maybe if he can't control himself and there's no way to handle a person like this, he does belong in a mental hospital. but they're saying there's no way to deal with this. Well, but Jamie, like the... Totally putting the perpetrator before the victims. And I get, listen, this man was failed on a number of different fronts.

He was failed. I don't know how hard his family tried to get him help. It is not impossible for somebody to learn sign language. It's absurd. And it's also not impossible for somebody to learn sign language later on in life. I reject anybody who would suggest that. The fact that they say, oh, there's nothing we can do. Well, you could have them learn sign language later on in life.

have him learn sign language. You could have him, you could send him to a hospital where there are experts on how to teach sign language to someone who is over 30. I'm not going to live in a world where that is, that is, we send people up into space, all right? We can definitely do that. And the fact that this judge in their, you know, their learned expertise said, no, can't even do that. And knowing that the consequence of that is deduble. denial of justice for the accusers is such an affront to me. I don't even know what to do with it. Yeah.

And the bigger picture of this is this judge is saying this one man is not subject to the criminal code at all. You know, if you can't examine him to see if he can stand before a court, if even that is a violation of his rights to the point where we can't have him in court, he can murder people. And it's, that's fine. Yeah. the conclusions you draw from this are truly crazy. Yeah. And like I said, I know that the life has done wrong by this man,

but if I was callous, I'd say everybody's got a goddamn sob story. And I'm not, so I wouldn't say that. But I could. And the frustration is building up in a lot of people. Like, give me the list. There's got to be a master list of traumas

that I can list that could guarantee that I will not go to prison for even the most heinous of crimes. And it looks like the roadmap has been written finally. This is what you have to be able to do not to go to prison. Jamie, I want to thank you so much. If people want to see your most recent column, it's in the National Post. I appreciate you. Thank you for being here today.