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An Ontario judge has ruled that “colonialism” was primarily to blame in a deadly drunk driving crash that saw a First Nations man kill a 12-year-old girl.
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According to police reports, Darris Wilson’s Dodge Ram pickup truck was strewn with empty and partially consumed cans of beer when, in 2022, it slammed head-on into a vehicle carrying a mother and daughter en route to a sleepover.
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Sierra Beverly, 12, was killed at the scene. Her mother, Naomi, suffered debilitating brain injuries for which she still requires 24-hour care.
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The crash occurred at 4:24 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, and investigators would determine that Harris seems to have made no attempt to brake before slamming into the Mitsubishi sub-compact carrying the two Beverlys. He was also driving at about 90 km/h in a 50 km/h zone.
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But in a sentencing decision released last week, Ontario Justice Gethin Edward predominantly focused on how Canada’s “colonial past” had turned Harris into a drunk driver.
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Wilson, he ruled, was suffering from cultural “disconnection” as a result of colonization, which “crystallized into the tragic events of Feb. 11, 2022.”
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Wilson was convicted of dangerous driving causing death and bodily harm, a crime which can carry a maximum jail term of 14 years.
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Instead, as per a report in the Brantford Expositor, Edward handed down a sentence of two years of house arrest — and specifically cited the offenders’ Indigenous background as the reason for the light sentence.
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The Crown had requested a prison sentence of four years, which Edward framed as a government effort to rob Wilson of his heritage.
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“Mr. Wilson’s efforts to regain his culture, that which was taken from him and his family in a systematic fashion by the Government of Canada, will once again be taken by the state if the court imposes a four-year penitentiary sentence,” he wrote.
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In fact, Edward would even frame the light sentence as a small but necessary gesture to do what he could to “erase this country’s colonial past.”
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“I’m left with this simple refrain: ‘If not now, when. If not this case, what case?’ To which I simply reply: Now, and this case,” he wrote, according to the Brantford Expositor.
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Both the judge and the offender are members of Six Nations of the Grand River, Canada’s most populous First Nation.
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Under Canadian “Gladue provisions,” first established in the 1990s, judges have been required to tailor criminal sentencing to the “circumstances” of Indigenous offenders.
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It’s a principle with which Edward is particularly associated. He championed the creation of a Gladue-focused Indigenous Persons Court in Brantford and has previously been celebrated for his efforts to “decolonize” the Canadian legal system.