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Colby Cosh: How the Supreme Court guaranteed light sentences for impulsive teen killers

A B.C. mechanic was stabbed to death in a parking lot in 2019. The culprits will only serve four years in jail — because they are underage

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I’d like to declare it for the record: I’m not happy that chronicling unnatural judicial outrages has become a full-time job for several National Post writers. But, dammit, the judges just keep serving them up hot and fresh. Today’s meal comes to you from the kitchen of the B.C. Court of Appeal, which on Friday overturned the life sentence given by a trial court to the teenaged killers of Pauly Prestbakmo. Prestbakmo, a 45-year-old auto mechanic in Surrey, B.C., was butchered randomly in a mall parking lot on Aug. 16, 2019. To quote directly from the decision of the appeal court, which contains overtones of regret and frustration:

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“…the appellants committed a brutal murder, using knives to stab Mr. Prestbakmo forty‑two times in the space of only 26 seconds. The wounds were scattered over Mr. Prestbakmo’s upper body. The appellants stabbed him in the chest, abdomen, back, neck, left forearm, and elbow. The wounds were deep and unsurvivable. They included serious damage to Mr. Prestbakmo’s pericardium, heart, both lungs, diaphragm and liver.”

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The trial judge, acting according to the legal standards applicable at the time, invoked the text of the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA) to allow for the playful lads to be tried as adults. They were convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life, with early parole eligibility required under the YCJA. The act allows minors to receive adult sentences if the judge is “satisfied” that two conditions are both met: a) “the presumption of diminished moral blameworthiness or culpability of the young person is rebutted,” and b) a youth sentence could not possibly be long enough to hold the young person accountable given the severity of the offence.

The Court of Appeal finds that the trial judge did everything more or less right according to the caselaw of the time. In his judgment he explicitly declared himself satisfied that there was no reason to attribute “diminished moral blameworthiness” to the teen killers. But then, last year, the Supreme Court delivered a decision, R. v. I.M., that changed the standards for adult sentencing. A majority of that court decided that adult culpability for young offenders must be established beyond a reasonable doubt: young offenders are entitled to a trial-within-a-trial of their moral reasoning capacity.

There’s a terrifying paradox here, one that wasn’t even an issue in either the I.M. case or the Prestbamko killing. The more random and meaningless an act of impulsive street violence is, the more likely it is to be deemed a sign of diminished capacity. If you plan a violent act in advance and have some articulable reason to do it, that reveals “sophistication and foresight,” and you are more likely to be treated as an adult in court. “Impulsiveness or bravado,” on the other hand, are indicia of mitigating immaturity, rather than personality features that the public needs to be protected from all the more urgently.

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In the precedent-setting I.M. case, two judges filed a dissenting opinion, and NP readers will hardly need to be told that these two judges were Justices Suzanne Côté and Malcolm Rowe. The pair pointed out that Parliament, in updating the YCJA in 2010, had specifically contemplated adding a “reasonable doubt” standard to the adult-sentencing analysis — and had, in the end, rejected that language in committee. The Supreme Court wrote it into the law anyway. As a result, the teen defendants in the earlier Prestbamko slaying weren’t given the benefit of a “reasonable doubt” trial of their moral bona fides, and their life sentence now has to be chucked out.

Their new sentence is the maximum allowed under the YCJA: seven years in all, with only the first four spent in prison. The clock started in November 2022, when the pair was initially sentenced, so they’ll be sprung by the end of the year at the latest. The author of the Court of Appeal opinion confesses awareness that this will be controversial.

“I have no doubt,” writes Justice Harvey Groberman, “that the brutality and senselessness of the crime in this case will cause some members of the public to view the overturning of the sentences as an injustice. This is, however, a court of law, bound to adhere to the dictates of statutes and the interpretations of them by a higher court.”

The poor fellow is right, of course: he was in no position to hoist the Jolly Roger and declare that the new I.M. doctrine dices no carrots in his province. The problem is as the top — i.e., within a Supreme Court of ultimate jurisdiction that offers little to no visible deference to either the “dictates of statutes” or to its own precedents.

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