The Province published an op-ed by Debra Parkes, a professor and chair in feminist legal studies at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at UBC, about the issue of mandatory minimum life sentences.
“An 18-year-old Indigenous teen who kills her abusive drug dealer [is] a situation that amounts to murder in our law,” wrote Parkes. “She is caught within the net of our sweeping mandatory sentencing regime. A judge has no choice but to give her a life sentence with no possibility of parole for at least 10 years. A mandatory sentence for murder paints a wide variety of people and circumstances with the same brush.”
The op-ed previously appeared in the Globe and Mail.