Fourteen to life: giving constitutional effect to the age-based presumption of diminished moral blameworthiness by respecting Parliament’s two-pronged test for adult sentence applications pursuant to section 72 of the Youth Criminal Justice Act
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the inception of the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA) 20 years ago, the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) has considered the adult sentence applications framework on only one occasion in R v DB, 2008 SCC 25. Additionally, Parliament enacted a major legislative overhaul of the provisions related to adult sentence applications in 2012. Without further input from the SCC, trial and appellate courts across Canada have filled the gaps in interpreting section 72 of the YCJA. On November 23, 2023, the SCC has announced they will hear the appeals of R v IM, 2023 ONCA 378 and R v SB, 2023 ONCA 369 and revisit the issue the presumption of diminished moral blameworthiness. The adult sentence application provisions are arguably the most important provision within the Act, given the serious jeopardy that goes along with an adult sentence. Courts across Canada have struggled to give constitutional effect to the age-based presumption of diminished moral blameworthiness. In this thesis, I present a critical examination of the current approaches to adult sentence applications and outline the best practices for youth court judges, Crown attorneys and defence lawyers. In support of this end, I have conducted a survey of 20 years of trial level adult sentence decisions from across Canada tracking the age, race, gender, support structures, and cognitive and mental health challenges, among other factors. I have framed this inquiry with the Critical Legal Studies tradition. However, given that adult sentence applications touch on a broad range of complex issues, portions of this thesis engage other legal and interdisciplinary theories including Critical Discourse Analysis, Law and Emotion Theory, Critical Race Theory and Disability Legal Theory. Ultimately, this thesis highlights the importance of respecting the letter and spirit of the law set forth by Parliament and by the Supreme Court of Canada in DB, in anticipation of the SCC’s upcoming consideration of these very important principles
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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 | 0.010 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".