Opinion: The driver who killed the Humboldt Broncos received too harsh of a sentence
In 2019, Canada’s criminal justice system faced an unusual test: a defendant so distraught over the catastrophic consequences of his small misdeed, he refused to mount any defence — though defences were available — and instructed his lawyer to make no recommendation on sentencing.
A bus carrying the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team T-boned the truck, killing 16 people on the bus and injuring 13. I have never lost a child, and I can scarcely imagine the soul-destroying anguish of those who have. It is no surprise, and no criticism of those who have lost family members, that victim-impact statements are often harshly retributive. As such, they add powerful emotional weight to the prosecution side of the scale. They bring raw emotion to a process meant to be dispassionate.
The U.S. jurist Thurgood Marshall complained that victim-impact statements take “the jury’s attention away from the character of the defendant and the circumstances of the crime to such illicit considerations as the eloquence with which family members express their grief and the status of the victim in the community.”
Canadian law required Cardinal to consider the horrific death toll in passing sentence. This seems perverse to me. All drivers occasionally commit inadvertent offences. Surely culpability ought to lie in the misbehaviour, not its consequences, which, in the Humboldt crash, amounted to one-in-a-billion bad luck. But the law is clear: the magnitude of the consequences must factor in, even if the underlying infraction was minor.
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