While you were so concerned about what Trudeau wore in India.
Mandatory-minimum sentencing rules unravelling into patchwork
Canada's web of mandatory-minimum jail terms is coming apart, leaving an uneven set of penalties for offenders, as judges in several provinces declare many such sentences grossly excessive and abhorrent.
In dozens of cases, most of them in the past three years, judges have declined to apply the minimum sentences required in a variety of gun and drug crimes and sexual offences against children, The Globe and Mail has found in a review of the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) national database of court rulings.
Instead, they are setting aside these obligatory sentences for specified crimes, describing them as a form of "cruel and unusual punishment" prohibited by the Constitution. That has left the judges free in some instances to use house arrest as an alternative to jail.
Only higher-level courts, such as superior courts of provinces and the Supreme Court of Canada, may strike a law down.
Such courts have done so on more than 25 occasions involving more than a dozen different minimum sentences.
The result is a patchwork of sentencing rules across the country. Although sentencing patterns normally vary somewhat in different regions, the Criminal Code is supposed to set out the basic ground rules uniformly across Canada. That is no longer true for sentencing in many drug, gun or sex crimes. Some mandatory minimums no longer exist in some jurisdictions, having been ruled unconstitutional, but are still being applied in others.
Taken together, the actions at multiple levels of court, and in several provinces and territories, amount to a judicial rejection of a key component of the former Conservative government's tough-on-crime agenda.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp...d+Web+Article+Links&__twitter_impression=true
Mandatory-minimum sentencing rules unravelling into patchwork
Canada's web of mandatory-minimum jail terms is coming apart, leaving an uneven set of penalties for offenders, as judges in several provinces declare many such sentences grossly excessive and abhorrent.
In dozens of cases, most of them in the past three years, judges have declined to apply the minimum sentences required in a variety of gun and drug crimes and sexual offences against children, The Globe and Mail has found in a review of the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) national database of court rulings.
Instead, they are setting aside these obligatory sentences for specified crimes, describing them as a form of "cruel and unusual punishment" prohibited by the Constitution. That has left the judges free in some instances to use house arrest as an alternative to jail.
Only higher-level courts, such as superior courts of provinces and the Supreme Court of Canada, may strike a law down.
Such courts have done so on more than 25 occasions involving more than a dozen different minimum sentences.
The result is a patchwork of sentencing rules across the country. Although sentencing patterns normally vary somewhat in different regions, the Criminal Code is supposed to set out the basic ground rules uniformly across Canada. That is no longer true for sentencing in many drug, gun or sex crimes. Some mandatory minimums no longer exist in some jurisdictions, having been ruled unconstitutional, but are still being applied in others.
Taken together, the actions at multiple levels of court, and in several provinces and territories, amount to a judicial rejection of a key component of the former Conservative government's tough-on-crime agenda.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp...d+Web+Article+Links&__twitter_impression=true
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