"The dangerous offender provisions are awesome and the implications draconian . . . Most would agree that it is comparatively easy to qualify repeat offenders as dangerous offenders. Surely such a sentence must be intended only for the extreme cases where the risk to society is unacceptably high, and there is no realistic hope for rehabilitation."

Those words are from a court ruling as a judge wrestled with the decision of whether or not to impose an indeterminate sentence that would most certainly keep an offender behind bars for years, even decades more likely, and quite possibly until he dies.

At the heart of the issue is this: What exactly IS a dangerous offender? Who would, or should, qualify as one? How does our justice system shoulder the responsibility of fairly imposing what is arguably one of the harshest penalties in Canadian law?

Is Warren Joseph Raphael a dangerous offender (DO)? The 44-year-old Regina man has killed three people. A lethal combination of drinking, carrying a knife, and a penchant for getting into fights around bars and parties ended in three manslaughter convictions spanning half his life.

Or consider Vernon Edward Blaker. Three months after being sent to a Regina halfway house to finish his sentence for raping a 13-year-old girl, he held a knife to the throat of a Regina store owner, unzipped his pants and demanded oral sex. Her refusal ended in a scuffle, and Blaker never made good on his threats because she fainted. He fled with $300. He would later tell police he had contemplated "dumping" the woman when he chased her down a hallway -- and could never explain why he didn't.

How about Michael Chad Ewenin? He held up a Regina gas station at knifepoint.

Alberta law professor Sanjeev Anand, formerly of the University of Saskatchewan, says the DO applications that tend to come before the courts "are the ones where the Crown has a reasonable chance of convincing the judge that this is one of the worst of the worst. Quite frankly, that's the way it should be. It's an extraordinary sentence with extraordinary implications."

In Saskatchewan, DOs have typically been the likes of Jacob Leroy Andrew Green. Rejected by a young Moose Jaw woman he had dated less than a month, Green stabbed her 36 times, her father 24 times, and her mother 12 times. Incredibly, they managed to survive; Green's stabbing victim six years earlier had not.

More often, the DO law has been used for sex offenders such as Clifford Barry Howdle, who had been out of prison for less than a month when he went on a 30-hour crime spree in central Saskatchewan, confining and brutally raping three women. At the time, he was on day parole for sexually assaulting two women.

In recent years, another sort of offender has joined these ranks. These offenders haven't killed or raped anyone. Fuelled by drugs and booze, they're repeat customers of the justice system, racking up lengthy records primarily for property offences, drunk driving, and breaching court orders, but more importantly with sufficient violent crimes of varying degrees -- robberies, threats, and assaults -- to qualify as a dangerous offender.

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