The Cruel Kindness of Excusing Crime

A reply to the insidious fashion among Canada’s white-saviour judiciary to discount sentences by race—and the slow, corrosive damage this does to justice, dignity, and the very idea of equality.

Writer Colby Cosh¹ recently pointed to a familiar and growing feature of Canadian justice: sentences that bend—not primarily around the crime—but around the biography of the criminal.

You see it often now.

The offender stands before the court, fully sane, fully aware, fully responsible in any ordinary sense—and yet, not quite. Because we are invited to con…