Man with cognitive deficits spared prison

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/10/2023 (745 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Arrested for a violent, knife attack that left his victim clinging to life, a Winnipeg man with severe cognitive deficits was spared a prison term Thursday after advocates argued it could amount to a death sentence.

“When I look at the whole picture, I am satisfied a sentence less than what will land you in the penitentiary is sufficient,” provincial court Judge Mary Kate Harvie told the 25-year-old man before sentencing him to 44 months custody for aggravated assault.

“It has always troubled me that we’re supposed to send people to jail as punishment, but not for punishment, and sometimes it feels like that is what is happening when we send someone to the federal institution,” Harvie said.

The Free Press is not naming the man, who lives with severe fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, has an IQ of 58, and has been involved with the justice system since he was 12.

Sentences of two years or longer are served in federal penitentiaries while sentences less than two years are served in provincial jails.

The Crown recommended the man be sentenced to six years, minus credit for 20 months spent in remand custody, leaving a balance of 40 months to be served in prison.

Harvie instead delivered a 44-month sentence that, when reduced by the 20 months in remand custody, allows the man to serve the balance of his sentence in jail.

Victim ‘partially eviscerated’

According to court records, the man was intoxicated June 4, 2022, when he was walking with the victim — someone he considered a friend — along Machray Avenue and for reasons still unexplained, slashed him across the stomach with a machete.

“He was partially eviscerated,” Crown attorney Jodi Koffman told court Thursday. “His intestines came out and he flatlined when the paramedics came…. This could have ended in a very different way,” Koffman said, calling the attack a “near murder.”

Koffman said he is one of the lowest-functioning offenders she has ever seen and has been the subject of costly supports — including, at one point, two support workers 24 hours a day.

As the man approaches his 26th birthday, he is aging out of many of the resources available to people living with FASD, she said.

“Unfortunately, we are getting to the point where the resources are shrinking,” she said. Appropriate housing options have been difficult or impossible to access for the man, whose volatile behaviour often results in him living on the street, where he is vulnerable to exploitation and increased drug and alcohol abuse.

Koffman argued a penitentiary sentence was necessary due to the man’s increasing risk to the public.

“I am concerned about how he will do in a federal system, I am concerned about how he will do anywhere,” she told the judge.

“I don’t stand up here taking that position lightly. The issue here is that there is an acceleration of violence and that it is getting to the point he is endangering people’s lives.”

“I am concerned about how he will do in a federal system, I am concerned about how he will do anywhere.”–Jodi Koffman

Defence lawyer Aaron Braun, whose sentencing recommendation Harvie endorsed, said his client’s prospects for rehabilitation would be best served by remaining at Headingley Correctional Centre, where his behaviour has been reported as positive.

Braun said the man has expressed a “fascination” for gangs and has been the target of gang members in the past who exploited his impulsivity and inability to make decisions in his own self-interest. If sent to prison, he will “be thrust into an environment where he will either be used by (gang members) to commit a crime or he could be killed, himself.”

“The sentence (the Crown) is asking for is not a life sentence, it is not a death sentence, but it could turn into one,” Braun said. “That’s the unfortunate, sad truth of the state of our federal correctional facilities.”

Prison “will eat him alive,” the man’s former foster father, Kevin Baldwin, told court. “He will do what the gangs say, or he will be dead.”

Society may want its “pound of flesh,” but a long sentence will do little to change the behaviour of someone with the man’s cognitive deficits, Baldwin said. “But where he goes from here can absolutely impact him.”

Harvie said there was a “clear link” between the man’s crime and his intellectual deficits, noting he has shown he can stay out of trouble if he remains sober.

Harvie sentenced him to an additional two years of supervised probation and urged him to take advantage of what resources remain available to him upon his release from custody.

“You have to take the help that is given you,” she said.

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca