R v Khawaja and the Fraught Question of Rehabilitation in Terrorism Sentencing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In R v Khawaja, Supreme Court of Canada addressed the question of how courts should handle the sentencing of terrorism offenders. Although it affirmed the Ontario Court of Appeal’s decision to raise the sentence imposed by the trial judge, the Supreme Court took a different approach to the importance of rehabilitation as a goal in terrorism sentencing generally. The Court of Appeal found that because of terrorism’s unique and serious nature, there should be very little consideration of the possibility of rehabilitation. The Supreme Court disagreed, ruling that the weight to be placed on rehabilitation in such cases should be left to trial judges and that, depending on the facts, rehabilitation could be a significant factor even in the context of very serious terror offences.\n\nThe author reviews the history of R v Khawaja, contrasting the Supreme Court’s decision with the approach of the Ontario Court of Appeal both in Khawaja and in a number of other cases. He reviews the British and Australian jurisprudence drawn on by the Court of Appeal, which looks on terrorism as a distinct type of crime that calls only for an emphasis on deterrence and punishment in sentencing, and argues that the Supreme Court’s decision indicates a significantly different attitude to the issue. Khawaja allows for rehabilitation to potentially factor into the sentencing of terrorism offenders. The author further considers this decision though the lens Antony Duff’s theory of punishment, which suggests that the concepts of moral agency, equality and the possibility of individual redemption are foundational to a sense of political community. He argues that the Supreme Court’s decision constitutes an implicit affirmation of Duff’s view on the importance of the goal of rehabilitation even for the worst offenders.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.019 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".