Canada Supremes: Children must deserve adult punishment

In a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court of Canada has just found a provision of the Youth Criminal Justice Act unconstitutional: the crown must demonstrate why minors deserve to be tried and punished as adults, rather than putting the onus on the minor to demonstrate why he or she does not deserve to be tried and punished as an adult.

“[The provision] clearly deprives young people of the benefit of the presumption of diminished moral blameworthiness based on age,” the ruling read.

“By depriving them of this presumption because of the crime and despite their age, and by putting the onus on them to prove that they remain entitled to the procedural and substantive protections to which their age entitles them, including a youth sentence, the onus provisions infringe a principle of fundamental justice.”

Thank goodness—another sudden breakout of common sense. Of course, this ruling has the Tories hopping mad, and Harper’s government is making lots of noise about doing a complete overhaul of the Youth Criminal Justice Act. This is part of a larger trend of laws imposing “reverse onus”—that is, forcing defendants to prove why X should not happen or apply to their case, rather than the prosecution—being passed by the government and found unconstitutional by the courts. The Tories went ahead with passing such laws despite testimony from experts that such laws would be found unconstitutional in legal challenges in the court system. Anyway, this one has been overturned, if only by a slim margin in the court, paving the way for more rulings of this type.