Darned right it doesn’t sit well.
Wednesday, 23-year-old Braedon Lee Gordon pleaded guilty to his fourth alcohol-related driving offence, and was sentenced to 35 months in prison.
With this offence, Gordon seriously and permanently injured an off-duty Winnipeg police officer, Dan Léveillé.
SUPPLIED Winnipeg Police Service Const. Dan Léveillé
Gordon was already suspended from driving at the time of the incident. Léveillé, on his way to work on his motorcycle, was struck head-on by the van Gordon was driving.
Gordon pleaded guilty to one charge of driving with a blood alcohol level over .08 causing bodily harm. The judge in the case sentenced Gordon to the term in prison jointly recommended by the Crown and Gordon’s defence lawyer.
Even as the sentence was being levied, it was clear that many would disagree with its brevity.
“The position being put forward is absolutely justifiable in law,” Crown attorney Nick Reeves told provincial court Judge David Mann. “That being said, the public will disagree.
“I don’t think anyone in this gallery believes three years or even four years is an appropriate sentence given the harm caused,” Reeves said. “We can justify these sentences legally by looking at moral blameworthiness when drivers don’t set out to hurt anyone, but when these offences cause more calamity than any other offence in the Criminal Code, it doesn’t sit well with the public when they see the sentences that are being imposed.”
You can see the legal logic in Reeves’ comments if you look at them in isolation, but they certainly do not sit well.
Why? Because while drunk drivers may not intentionally set out to hurt anyone, everybody knows full well that drunk drivers have hurt — and killed — people, do hurt and kill people, and will continue to hurt and kill people. It’s not a surprise occurrence — it’s not an unexpected result from a sequence of unpredictable events.
And even the Crown admits that.
“Mr. Gordon’s record is nothing short of infuriating,” Reeves told the court. “He was a ticking time bomb on the streets. This sort of calamity was inevitable.”
Let’s parse that sentence.
If Gordon had actually put a ticking time bomb on a street, leading to a different kind of inevitable and explosive calamity — one where Const. Léveillé ended up with similar serious injuries — you would certainly expect that Gordon would have been sentenced to far more than 35 months in prison. Wouldn’t you?
So what exactly is supposed to be the difference?
The truth is that — as we have said in this space before and will not doubt end up saying again and again and again — drunk-driving offences are treated differently.
Such crimes have a long history of being treated differently. They have a long-established pattern of jurisprudence and well-worn precedents that mean, without a functional change in the Criminal Code of Canada, they will continue to be treated as a lesser form of violent offence, one where the pain and suffering of individuals and their families necessarily counts for less.
Reeves was absolutely right when he said, “The position being put forward is absolutely justifiable in law.”
He was also absolutely right when he added, “That being said, the public will disagree.”
What has to happen is that the law has to change, if in no other way than to make the punishment fit the crime — particularly in the case of consistent reoffenders.
A crucial part of the justice system is that punishment for crimes is a meaningful deterrent, and it’s not really clear that there’s enough deterrence in drunk-driving penalties.
There are simply too many ticking time bombs out there.
You’ll hear this again, the next time one goes off.
It probably won’t be a long wait.
