30 Jan A case of judicial jury nullification

Defence attorney Luke Craggs had it right when he called Chief Justice Joseph Kennedy’s excessive sentence in the Joseph Landry manslaughter case, “the sort of sentence career criminals and gangsters get for manslaughter, not guys who have fished for 52 years and pay their taxes and earned an honest living.”

Clearly, Kennedy disagreed with the jury’s not-guilty finding on the second-degree murder charge, and sentenced Landry for the verdict he wishes it had returned, not the one it did.  It’s a case of judicial jury nullification that brings no credit to the court.

This marks the latest failure of the criminal justice system in a case that has its roots in a decades-old reign of terror by lobster poacher Phillip Boudreau, which Contrarian readers and I detailed here and here. You have to wonder Boudreau would still be alive had the RCMP, the Public Prosecution Service, and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans heeded pleas from Petit-de-Grat residents to end his flagrant lawlessness.

Mainstream media in Nova Scotia have likewise ignored Boudreau’s history as a thug who stole lobster for a living, sold them brazenly in public, and threatened murder and mayhem against anyone who dared complain.

None of this excuses the terrible crime Landry committed on waters off Petit-de-Grat June 1, 2013, but it was clearly a factor in the lenient jury verdict, and it should have been a factor in Landry’s sentence.