Eyes Wide Shut: The Alberta Court of Appeal’s Decision in <i>R. v. Arcand</i> and Aboriginal Offenders
Bibliographic record
Abstract
R. v. Arcand was no ordinary sentence appeal. It was a reconsideration of four previous Alberta Court of Appeal sexual assault decisions. It was an opportunity to discuss the significance of starting point sentences - essentially appellate court mandated starting points to be followed by lower court judges when issuing sentences for specific sub-categories of offences. The decision also purports to provide a clear-eyed assessment of the problems with sentencing in Canada since the passage of Bill C-41 in 1996 and a way out of the morass of unprincipled sentencing decisions by lower judges that have eroded Canadians’ faith in the justice system itself. However, there is something missing in the decision. The force of the reasoning advanced in Arcand is strongly diminished by the Court of Appeal’s failure to advert to the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in R. v. Gladue and to the realities of Aboriginal overrepresentation in Canadian and, more specifically, Alberta correctional facilities. Recognition of Gladue should lead to a reconsideration of the conclusions in Arcand on the issues of proportionality, Aboriginal concepts of sentencing, circumstances of the Aboriginal offender, general deterrence, and the way sentences reflect harm to victims.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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".