Jamie Sarkonak: Supreme Court puts gangster youth before public safety
The court went on to add that this should be a nuanced inquiry that doesn't involve stereotyping or racial discounts — even though that's exactly what's going on here. The racial dimension is most helpful to the groups who are most abundant in the youth gang population: Black youth (25 per cent of underage gangsters, according to the most recent data, found in a 2002 Public Safety report), followed by First Nations (21 per cent).
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Altogether, this decision is most helpful for Canada's most brazenly dangerous, out-of-control youth: the ones who have already been inducted into gang life, whose parents are absent or even supportive of their actions, who live to glorify violence and who are unlikely to be rehabilitated. The ones who swarm, stab and shoot others in public, with no regard for human life, and the ones who brag online about killing harmless elderly ladies on the way home from the grocery store.
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It's also an additional incentive for gangs to recruit minors into their ranks — something they already do to minimize legal risk, and are sure to do more now that adult sentencing has likely been relegated to history.
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Altogether, the killer of Shahnaz Pestonji is exactly the kind of person that the majority of the Supreme Court set out to protect from facing the deserved consequences. The boy is Black, 14 and likely of a rough and disadvantaged background given his actions. Based on his actions, he appears to be lacking in sophistication and revelling somewhat in bravado, having appeared to have to participated in an interview — while on the run from police — to tell his side of the story: 'She didn't give me the keys so I yoked her,' explained the subject, adding that he 'wasn't even scared.'
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The interviewee expressed regret in killing the woman ('Fam … that was an idiot thing. Cause, I can't lie, after I think about it, she didn't deserve it … Low key I would not have done that stuff.'), but overall, it was clear he was on a completely different moral plane than the average Canadian.
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