The Law Courts building, which is home to B.C. Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal, in Vancouver in January.ETHAN CAIRNS/The Canadian Press
They were off to do their Christmas shopping. But when they reached the mall, Everton Javaun Downey stabbed his intimate partner Melissa Blimkie 15 times with a folding knife and left her to die in a stairwell.
Last month, a B.C. Supreme Court judge said Mr. Downey could apply for parole in just 12 years for the unprovoked, second-degree murder of Ms. Blimkie, barely above the statutory minimum of 10 years.
How did Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes reach that conclusion? There has been some public attention given to her use of race-based disadvantage as a mitigating factor, diminishing the extra toll his long history of violent offences would usually add to his sentence. But in our reading, she settled on 12 years largely by looking at other second-degree murder cases in the province of similar or even greater brutality in which an intimate partner was the victim.
A long line of cases in B.C. has established that the parole ineligibility period for most such homicides is just 12 to 15 years. This is far too low, and makes a mockery of this country’s determination to protect women from homicide.
The punishment of second-degree murder in cases of intimate partner violence needs a complete reset.
For context, second-degree murder in Canada brings an automatic sentence of life in prison; judges decide how long the offender should wait for a parole hearing – anywhere from 10 to 25 years. At its maximum, then, it equals the automatic parole ineligibility period of 25 years for first-degree murder – Parliament’s recognition that second-degree can be as horrifying and as worthy of punishment as first. (Both categories of murder involve an intent to kill; first-degree means additional planning went into it.)
In practice, however, judges in B.C. and some other jurisdictions treat 20 years as the upper limit, with 25 reserved for the theoretical “worst case.” Alberta is an outlier. In 2015, its appeal court set down 16 to 20 years as a guideline for most intimate-partner killings, and its lower-court judges have imposed 25 years occasionally in second-degree murder cases. Still, in jurisdictions like B.C. and Ontario, judges view most cases on a sliding scale below 18, depending on the brutality, the criminal record, the judge’s perception of future dangerousness and the offender’s prospects of rehabilitation.
Tracing to its beginnings the line of cases that established 12 to 15 years as the norm for brutal intimate-partner killings, we go back to 1999, when a doctor stabbed his wife for 10 to 15 minutes with a 10-inch serrated knife. The trial judge imposed 17 years of parole ineligibility (a jury had recommended 20) but Ontario’s appeal court reduced it to 14. Even as society has evolved in its understanding of the horror of intimate partner killings, and in its determination to fight back against that scourge, some provinces have been stuck on the same 12- to 15-year judge-set guideline from decades ago.
Thus, when the Crown in last month’s B.C. case of Everton Javaun Downey asked for 13 to 15 years, which in our view was shockingly low, it never stood a chance.
Consider the unfathomably violent, sickening B.C. cases it was up against. In 2017, Jian Hua James Wu got 15 years’ parole ineligibility after he chopped and hacked his wife 250 times with a cleaver, with their seven-year-old daughter present in their suite. If that crime does not merit the 25-year maximum for parole ineligibility, what would?
This strikes us as a case where second- and first-degree should meet in sentencing.
Then there’s the 2011 case of Mukhtiar Singh Panghali, who strangled his spouse, who was four months pregnant. He then set fire to the remains on a beach. Like Mr. Wu, he got 15 years before becoming eligible for parole. Or consider that Tejwant Danjou got just 12 years before parole eligibility for the prolonged and fatal beating of his spouse in 2018.
Judges use the principle that similar offenders and crimes deserve similar sentences. But they’ve tied themselves in knots around an outdated precedent. Their sentencing guidelines bear little relation to what Parliament has been seeking to accomplish with federal sentencing law – including a law that makes the murder of a spouse or intimate partner an aggravating factor for the judge to consider.
Associate Chief Justice Holmes felt bound by previous cases – though those cases have long since ceased to reflect Canadians’ abhorrence of intimate-partner violence.
Judges seem determined to repeat the wrongs of the past in these intimate-partner murders. It’s time for a rethink.