Another judge balks at mandatory minimum sentences for gun crimes

By Colby Cosh - Monday, July 16, 2012 at 1:39 PM - 0 Comments

Alex Consiglio/Toronto Sun

The judicial revolt is spreading. On July 6, Ontario Court Justice Paul Bellefontaine became the province’s second judge this year to balk at the Conservative government’s mandatory-minimum sentences for gun crime, introduced in 2008. Jeffrey Mazin, the lawyer defending the accused, had a tough job. Over four occasions last year, his client, Christopher Lewis, sold a total of 53 g of crack cocaine to an undercover cop. Lewis, then 20 years old, was willing to own up to being a drug dealer. But the high-stakes gun charge thrown into the indictment, Mazin thought, was a little over the top.

It was a little over the top for a simple reason: there was no gun. Section 99 of the Criminal Code makes it an offence to transfer or to “offer to transfer” a firearm to another person unless one is an authorized gun vendor. Lewis admitted that he had been talking tough and had offered to sell the policeman a “four-fifths”—a .45-calibre handgun. But he never actually had access to a gun, and the detective’s testimony confirmed that whenever the date of the proposed sale came up, Lewis made some excuse for not producing the goods. This happened over and over. The accused simply wanted to prolong his lucrative commercial relationship with an increasingly formidable crack buyer.

The minimum sentence for a Section 99 offence under the 2008 Criminal Code amendments is three years—no exceptions. But despite Lewis’s admitted drug offences, Mazin was able to convince Justice Bellefontaine that it was ridiculous to give a man three years in jail for the admittedly illegal non-sale of a non-gun. The argument was relatively easy to make, thanks to February’s ruling by Ontario Superior Court Justice Anne Molloy in the unforgettable case of Leroy Smickle.

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REVIEW: Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

It’s the iconic gun of our times. More American cops and more American spree killers carry a Glock than any other handgun. It’s the weapon Seung-Hui Cho used to murder 32 people at Virginia Tech; the gun Saddam Hussein had in his hidey-hole; the gun that football player Plaxico Burress shot himself in the leg with; the gun Jared Loughner fired at Gabrielle Giffords and many others a year ago. And the gun Giffords herself owned. How a weapon made by an unknown curtain-rod manufacturer in Austria in 1980 reached these heights is part wild business story—the true interest of the author, an editor at Bloomberg Businessweek—and part cultural history.

When Gaston Glock learned the Austrian army was seeking a new handgun, he went to work unhampered by any firm opinion as to how a gun should look or what it should be made of. He emerged with the Glock 17. Crafted in part of lightweight plastic, with a large magazine (17 bullets) and only 36 parts, the pistol would still fire after being dropped from a helicopter or lying in snow overnight. Its preference for efficiency over style was nicely captured by novelist David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest: “one ugly and all-business-looking piece of self-defence hardware.”

Its timing was impeccable too. The Glock arrived in America in the late ’80s, just as law enforcement agencies were in a panic about being outgunned by drug gangs. Hollywood and hip hop helped glamorize it: “As we groove down the block, Dre, pass the Glock,” rapped Snoop Dogg in 1992. Then there was the eye-popping business story. Marketing campaigns involving Gold Club strippers, money laundering, tax evasion and illegal campaign contributions are not exactly unheard of in the arms industry. But the company’s brief history also includes a crooked financial adviser who attempted to assassinate—with a mallet, not a pistol—Gaston Glock, now a billionaire. For an Austrian gun, it’s a very American story.