Gladue

What Do You Get For Riding a Bicycle, Intoxicated, the Wrong Way Down a One-Way, Busy Downtown Street?

Peter Scott Vicaire1 Comment

A trip to the Supreme Court of Canada!

R. v. Ipeelee seems like an odd case for the Supreme Court to hear, but Justices Binnie, Fish, and Rothstein granted the leave to appeal from the  Court of Appeal for Ontario.  Perhaps a substantial re-visit to Gladue is forthcoming.  Maybe it’s because of the seemingly harsh sentence (30 months imprisonment + 6 months pre-custody).    Who knows?  Regardless, it should be an interesting one to watch.  The Director of Public Prosecutions and the Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto Inc.  were both allowed as interveners.

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Gladue and the Aboriginal Criminal Sentencing Discount

Peter Scott Vicaire

Last week, in R. v. Collins, the Ontario Court of Appeal lessened the sentence an Aboriginal woman received from 16 months incarceration and two years probation to 10 months incarceration and two years probation. 

Susan Collins was a participant in a scheme to defraud Ontario of money from social assistance benefits.  The amount directly attributed to Collins was in excess of $96,000.  But Collins was only one part of a larger scheme and the total estimated financial loss due to the fraudulent activity while the scheme was operating is $1.285 million.  Collins’ role was to provide identities for which false claims were created and to then cash the cheques issued on those files.  She processed 67 cheques in the total amount of $96,298.   

Her sentence was reduced by six months because the Gladue principle, originating from R. v. Gladue, [1999] 1 S.C.R. 688, was in play.

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Canadian Courts Failing to Reduce Incarceration of Natives

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From the Globe and Mail via How Appealing:

All things being equal, Dennis Thibault didn’t have a prayer of getting bail.

The lanky, fast-talking street person had evaporated into the streets of downtown Toronto last July, after his arrest on cocaine-trafficking charges, and missed three consecutive court dates. Few judges would have considered taking a chance on him again.

But all things were not equal. The courtroom Mr. Thibault was led into last week – known as a Gladue Court – was created after a landmark Supreme Court of Canada ruling urged judges to be sensitive to the long-standing plight of aboriginal people.

Mr. Thibault was released on bail with a token $500 surety and a direction that he take drug treatment at an aboriginal centre.

“My client was very fortunate that the stars lined up for him,” Mr. Thibault’s lawyer, Steven Dallal, said afterward. “His counterpart in an ordinary court would probably not have been released.”

The outcome for Mr. Thibault was an exception. Ten years after the Supreme Court described aboriginal over-incarceration as a full-fledged crisis that must be attacked at all levels, the response has been erratic and piecemeal.

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