Provincial Court

Youth Justice court

Citation: R. v. T.D.R., 2015 NSPC 25

Date: 2015-04-22

   Docket:  1467981-1467990 

Registry: Pictou

Between:

Her Majesty the Queen

v.

T.D.R.

SENTENCING DECISION

RESTRICTION ON PUBLICATION: NO PERSON SHALL PUBLISH THE NAME OF A YOUNG PERSON OR ANY INFORMATION RELATED TO A YOUNG PERSON IF IT WOULD IDENTIFY THE YOUNG PERSON AS A YOUNG PERSON DEALT WITH UNDER THE YOUTH CRIMINAL JUSTICE ACT.

By the Court:

[1]             The court has for sentencing T.D.R.  There are youth matters that have been in suspended animation for over a decade and some new adult charges.

[2]             I am going to deal with the youth matters first because the Supreme Court of Canada has determined that they should be subject to a separate proceeding.

[3]             Mr. R. entered guilty pleas at the first opportunity after he was brought to court in custody in relation to a 10-count information involving break and enters into sheds, several involving dwellings, and then a boat at the Pictou Marina.  At several of those locations, property was stolen, property of considerable value, and we don’t have a great deal of information about the recovery of the stolen property.

[4]             These offences occurred over a decade ago, and Mr. R. is now 28 years old.

[5]             I do take into account the principles of sentencing set out in Sections 38 and 39 of the Youth Criminal Justice Act.  There is no doubt that the gateway to custody is open, given Mr. R.’s probation history as a youth.  However, since the time Mr. R. did what he did in 2002 to 2004, the Province has undertaken a complete review of the youth-criminal-justice process set out in the Report of the Nunn Commission of Inquiry almost nine years back.  I don’t have the Report right in front of me, but a key recommendation set out in the Report was that the Province and all justice system participants commit the necessary resources  to speeding up the administration of justice for young persons in conflict with the law.  This only makes sense.  If the main objective of youth sentencing is to provide meaningful consequences, then there can be no doubt that delay—particularly, as in this case, a decade-long delay—will hinder that objective.

[6]             What is unfathomable here is why Mr. R., after having been taken into custody by police in September of 2004, after having given a fulsome confession, including admitting to things for which he was not a suspect, was apparently released unconditionally, so that when his charges were first before the court on 5 October 2004, there was no process before the court.  Mr. R. had left the area by then, there was nothing compelling his attendance, and so there was no basis for the prosecution to have applied for a no-show warrant.  It certainly would have been possible, had diligent efforts been made to locate Mr. R., and those efforts failed, to have sought a public-interest warrant, but that was not done.  I am informed that none of these charges was entered on CPIC.  There is no CPIC policy reason why that should not have been done back then.  I mean, I’m not intricately familiar with the CPIC policy, but I have seen entries on CPIC that refer to pending charges where there is either no warrant or no process outstanding.  Had that step been taken, then the Nova Scotia charges might have come to someone’s attention—including Mr. R.’s—when he wound up in conflict with the law outside the Province some time later.  Certainly, this demonstrates, in my view, a significant lapse in police operations, first, in not releasing Mr. R. on appropriate youth-justice process and serving a notice to parent, and, secondly, in not following up and attempting to locate Mr. R. or documenting his charges in the national database.

[7]             Ordinarily, I would have agreed with the prosecution that a custodial sentence would be appropriate here for the youth-justice matters.  However, in my view, any public interest in placing Mr. R. into custody on these charges has been exhausted because of the inexplicable delay in getting Mr. R. before the court.  Moreover, in 2009, as I understand it, Mr. R. was incarcerated in a federal institution having been convicted of robbery.  I find it incomprehensible that it would not have been possible to have linked that sentence entry up to these pending charges had appropriate record keeping and data entry be done by the local policing service.  Sending this man, with his intervening institutional history, to custody for a decade-old offence does not seem meaningful, even though the sentence would be served in an adult facility under sub-s. 89(1) of the YCJA.

[8]             In my view, the meaningful consequence in this case is that Mr. R. be reprimanded in relation to each of the charges before the court on the YCJA Information.

Atwood,  JPC