Recorded: 9 June 2023, 75 minutes

The modern sentencing trilogy – Lacasse, Friesen, and Parranto – are frequently cited by Crown attorneys to justify higher sentences in drunk driving, sexual assault, and fentanyl trafficking cases. But read together, they stand for a powerful and defence-friendly sentencing proposition: a trial judge is free to impose a sentence well below the range where they feel it is proportionate to the circumstances of the offence and offender. In this seminar, Chris Rudnicki and Theresa Donkor explain how they achieved the result in R v Kelly, 2022 ONSC 5500: a conditional sentence for an offender convicted of imposing 1 kg of cocaine. In particular, they discuss the potential for social context evidence to justify unusually low sentences.