Jamie Sarkonak: Progressive judge spares violent loan shark criminal record to avoid deportation

Photo by WINDSOR STAR/DAN JANISSE

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Last month, it wasn’t just a judge who excused a Ghanaian work permit holder for beating a woman in the street over an unpaid loan. It was also the Crown prosecutor.

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The 34-year-old, known only as E.A. due to a publication ban, admitted to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice that he lured a woman who owed him money into a basement to demand repayment. The victim’s account was that, at this point, he put her in a choke hold, tried to rape her and took her phone as collateral, but in court only the phone theft was established to have occurred. (E.A. had countered that there was no attempted raping or choking, that the woman had a motive to fabricate such a story, and that the woman chased him out).

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Security footage showed them both returning to the street, where they fought until E.A. pushed the woman to the ground and sped off in his car, leaving her alone on a dark, suburban road without a way to contact anyone for help.

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Later, at the woman’s request, E.A. returned her phone. But a theft had still occurred, and a jury ultimately convicted him for it.

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That left the question of sentence, which was to be answered by Justice Renu Mandhane, who was previously the chair of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, a role she used to champion progressive politics in the Ontario government. She pushed the notion that police were racist based on mere differences in statistics, that race should play an even bigger role in public service hiring and that gender identity should be taught in schools.

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Mandhane has been a judge since 2020, and has used her post to continue her activism. In one case last year, for example, involving a Black man accused of possessing an illegal gun, she excluded the gun from trial because she felt the police had been racist despite admitting there was “no direct evidence of racial profiling” to substantiate the accusation. She scrutinized the police officer’s behaviour, found that he fell ever so short of perfection, and concluded he was somehow racist.

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She’s not the only Ontario judge to do this: another former racial justice advocate and recent Liberal appointee, Faisal Mirza, has let illegal gun-toting Black men go for similar reasons at least twice.

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In the case of E.A., however, Mandhane didn’t have to do much logic-bending to get to a result that let him off easy. Both the man’s defence lawyer and the Crown prosecutor agreed that he should receive a conditional discharge: instead of a conviction, he would be given a few tasks by a probation officer to complete to repent for his actions, and, as long as he fulfilled them, no criminal record.

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Mandhane agreed. She noted the sympathetic aspects of his case: he was “relatively youthful” at 34, and didn’t have a criminal record (though, he’d only been in Canada since 2015).

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“The offender is married with three children — one of whom has autism — and he is actively involved in their lives,” she continued. “The offender’s wife attended his trial and continues to support his rehabilitation. The offender is self-employed as a contractor. He has a valid permanent work permit and has applied for permanent residency in Canada. Because he is not a Canadian citizen, however, he will only be eligible to remain in Canada if I grant him a discharge.”