Smith and the Supreme Court: Implications for Sentencing Policy and Reform
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Supreme Court of Canada does not often address matters of sentencing policy because of its practice of not hearing appeals on the fitness of sentences and generally leaving sentencing matters to lower courts. When the Court does address such matters, its pronouncements should be carefully examined. In R. v. Smith, the Court struck down a seven-year mandatory minimum sentence for importing narcotics as cruel and unusual punishment under section 12 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. All the judges accepted the general notion that a grossly or excessively disproportionate sentence constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, but the various opinions issued reflect the difficulty of imposing overarching principles and purposes on matters of sentencing policy as well as differences of opinion on the role courts should play in imposing constitutional limitations on punishments. The visions of sentencing policy put forth in Smith and the implications of the plurality's ruling are especially important now that the Canadian Sentencing Commission has released its report and, comprehensive sentencing reform is very much a live issue in Canada.The first part of this essay assesses the Supreme Court's decision in Smith. The second part of this essay examines some of the implications of Smith for sentencing reform. Most importantly, Smith represents a constitutional concern about the effects that punishment will have on particular offenders. Finally, the last part of this essay will critically evaluate various visions of proportionality and the role that proportionality review can play in a reformed sentencing structure.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".