OTTAWA — A 19-year-old man has been sentenced to a lengthy prison term for a shooting he committed while on a conditional release from custody in Thunder Bay.
One of those conditions was a prohibition against possession of a handgun.
He was 18 years old when Ottawa police charged him with discharging a firearm with intent to wound, aggravated assault and other related offences.
In the April 2022 incident that led to those charges, he used a semi-automatic handgun to fire six times at another man in the parking lot of an apartment complex, wounding him three times and leaving him with a permanent limp.
While he was still under 18, in 2021 the accused had been charged as a youth by Thunder Bay police with possession of cocaine for trafficking, assault with a weapon and forcible confinement.
The incident in Ottawa occurred while the young man was on conditional release pending the outcome of the case in Thunder Bay.
In November 2022, in youth court in Thunder Bay, he was sentenced to 12 months probation for drug possession, and this May he was given a six-month custody and supervision order after being convicted of forcible confinement and assault.
Last month, the presiding judge at his trial as an adult in Ottawa took note of what happened in Thunder Bay while he was a youth, saying they "make weight on his prospects for rehabilitation."
The man was still a first offender at the time of the shooting, but the judge said he agreed with the Crown that "the fact of his prior charges as a youth should not be ignored or discounted merely as a result of the order in which his other convictions were imposed."
The maximum punishment for discharging a firearm with intent to wound or to endanger life is 14 years.
The Crown recommended a sentence of nine years less credit for pre-sentence custody, while the defence asked for five to six years, less credit.
As the Ottawa judge noted in his reasons for sentence, the Crown identified multiple aggravating features of the shooting including:
- that the accused was subject at the time to an order forbidding him to possess a handgun
- that the handgun he possessed was loaded
- that he fired the gun in a public space, risking harm to bystanders
- that he fired the gun multiple times
- that he hit the victim with three bullets
- that it was merely a matter of chance that the victim's injuries were not worse
The defence lawyer agreed that a penitentiary sentence was required, and said weapons offences are abhorred by the community, but the appropriate message could be delivered by a balance of deterrence moderated due to his client's "prospects for rehabilitation particularly because of his age and lack of any prior adult record."
He said that many of the sentencing precedents that the Crown was relying on involved cases where the offender was older, or had a lengthy prior criminal record, unlike his client.
The defence also asked the court to consider that the young man was living alone in Canada without guidance from his parents because they live overseas.
On Sept. 22, after credit for time served the man was handed a sentence of six years and five months in prison for discharging a firearm with intent, plus six months for possession of a firearm while prohibited.
When he's released from prison, he'll be banned from possessing any firearm, crossbow, restricted weapon, ammunition or explosive substance for 10 years.
