Spaces of Exception in Canadian Hate Crimes Legislation: Accounting for the Effects of Sexuality-Based Aggravation in R. V. Cran
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the absence of evidence of hate as a motivating factor, the sentencing decision for R. v. Cran (2005) by the British Columbia Supreme Court did not find that the beating death of Aaron Webster at a popular gay stroll in Vancouver's Stanley Park was a hate crime. This case exemplifies the shortcomings in Canada's hate crimes regime and proves the point that the scene of the crime must be looked at as containing the aggravating element of hate. Building on the work of Roberts and Hastings, I argue that Canada's current sentencing legislation for hate crimes permits a space of exception because of an over-emphasis on the motivation of the accused at sentencing, difficulties associated with proving motive beyond a reasonable doubt and, more importantly, the failure of the provision to contemplate the hateful circumstances surrounding the commission of an offence. Where the circumstances go unacknowledged, the victims of hate remain outside the protection of the law. Legislation from other jurisdictions is presented where, in addition to motive, the acts and the context of the crime are considered as legitimate aggravating factors. Such legislation is better equipped to: 1) fulfill the purposes and principles behind sentencing in Canada; 2) fashion a penalty which responds to the effects of the crime on the individual and their community; and, 3) encourage police, Crown prosecutors, and jurists to become more sensitive to the ways that normative concepts of space and identity may obscure the operation of hate in the commission of an offence. I suggest that the fluid and contingent identities of the body and space have implications for perceiving bias during the commission of the offence, or immediately before or after the incident. Despite the admirable policy objectives of this type of legislation, I conclude with a cautionary note on its efficacy and its implicit support of a law and order politics.
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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".