Since when is a citizen's arrest vigilante justice?

The criminal charges laid against a Toronto store owner who apprehended a shoplifter have sent pundits scrambling to their keyboards to pound out angry op-eds.

Some court cases, like the Robert Semrau trial, have long-lasting, far-reaching, consequences. And others, well, they just make people mad. Such is the case with the trial of Toronto’s David Chen, who’s been charged with forcible confinement after he chased down a career shoplifter brazen enough to return to Chen’s store less than an hour after robbing it. Chen and two employees tied the man up and threw him into a van while they waited for police. Usually this kind of story would be the exclusive purview of touchy tough-on-crime Toronto Sun columnists, but it’s being seen as such a prime example of a justice system gone mad that even national papers have their knickers in a twist over it.

A Globe and Mail editorial scoffs at the prosecution’s depiction of “the cruel David Chen and his marauding two-member gang of Toronto greengrocers.” Not only is the entire case unjustified, the Crown wasn’t even prepared for trial and had yet to find qualified Cantonese interpreters or locate a working VCR to play evidence on. This farce “provides alarming illustration of why glacial is pretty much top speed for Canadian courts.”

The National Post’s Kelly McParland is sarcastically unsurprised that the Crown couldn’t find Cantonese interpreters in the 17 months it had to prepare, “because, you know, there are no Chinese people in Toronto. And see if you can detect more sarcasm in this sentence: “Boy do we support the idea that David Chen should be made an example of because otherwise honest people might think they had a right to protect themselves … And we can’t have that.”

“Why on Earth is David Chen on trial?” asks a Montreal Gazette editorial. “What a sad image of Canadian justice this case transmits … Anyone who takes action against a known repeat shoplifter is branded as a criminal, while the real criminal gets a reduced sentence” for testifying against the man he repeatedly stole from. “Giving David Chen anything more than a warning is simply abusive.”