Chris Murphy

Following a guilty plea to assault causing bodily harm, the court sentenced the accused after receiving a section 21 Mental Health Act assessment.

The court treated deterrence and denunciation as primary given a serious group assault causing significant physical and emotional harm to a good Samaritan, but weighed substantial mitigating factors including childhood trauma, mental health diagnoses, substance use disorder, guilty plea, and rehabilitation prospects.

Applying sentencing principles under ss. 718 and 718.2 of the Criminal Code and conditional sentence jurisprudence, the court held a structured community-based sanction could still meet denunciation and deterrence.

The sentence imposed was 18 months conditional with staged restrictions, counselling and no-contact terms, followed by three years' probation, plus a DNA order.

In a first-degree murder prosecution, the Crown and defence brought pretrial applications regarding the admissibility of evidence.

The Crown sought to admit recognition evidence from the accused's probation officer identifying him in surveillance videos.

The defence sought to admit evidence of the deceased's prior violent acts and threats to support a claim of self-defence.

The court admitted the recognition evidence, finding it met the threshold for reliability.

The court also permitted the defence to introduce evidence of prior altercations involving the deceased, but excluded hearsay evidence regarding the deceased allegedly stating he was going to get a gun.

Finally, the court ruled that introducing evidence of the deceased's violent nature opened the door for the Crown to introduce evidence of the accused's propensity for violence.

Nedeljko Mikasinovic was convicted by a jury of assault causing bodily harm, an included offence of aggravated assault.

The sentencing judge rejected the defense's claim of self-defense, finding the assault unprovoked, gratuitous, and disproportionate, resulting in severe and permanent brain injury to the victim.

Despite mitigating factors such as the offender's efforts to rehabilitate and positive character references, the judge found the offender lacked genuine remorse and had a history of violent offenses.

The Crown sought a penitentiary sentence of 2.5 years, while the defense sought a suspended or intermittent sentence.

The court imposed a 14-month reformatory sentence, two years probation, a 10-year weapons prohibition, and a non-communication order.

The accused, charged with aggravated assault, brought a Corbett application to prohibit the Crown from cross-examining him on his criminal record.

The record consisted of youth and adult convictions that were over a decade old, including a suspended sentence for assault.

The court granted the application, finding that the probative value of the remote convictions was low and outweighed by the risk of the jury engaging in prohibited propensity reasoning, especially given the limited nature of the defence's attack on the Crown witnesses' credibility.