Late in February, Crown and defence lawyers made sentencing arguments in the case of Marco Muzzo, who has pleaded guilty to six charges, including four counts of impaired driving causing death, related to a 2015 crash in Vaughan, Ont., that killed three children and their grandfather.
In court in Newmarket, prosecutor Paul Tait asked for a prison sentence of 10 to 12 years, and defence lawyer Brian Greenspan asked for eight. Muzzo will be sentenced today.
Over the decision about Muzzo’s sentence loom the shadows of other, depressingly similar tragedies.
Recent Canadian sentences for impaired driving causing death have ranged between five and 10 years, depending on the circumstances and the offender’s prior record. But a horrific collision in London, Ont., in 2009, cited by Greenspan during arguments about sentencing, has several similarities to the Muzzo case.
READ MORE: Liveblog of the Muzzo sentencing hearing
The dry language of the Ontario Court of Appeals decision, upholding an eight-year prison sentence for the driver, doesn’t conceal the grief and violence of the event it describes.
On a Friday night in March in 2009, Jason Berube was driving two 12-year-old boys, his son and a friend, back from a hockey game.
At a stop sign, they met a pickup truck driven by Andrew Kummer. Kummer had drunk the equivalent of 15 to 20 beers, and was driving 122 km/h in a 70 km/h zone. Berube realized that Kummer’s vehicle wasn’t going to stop, but too late to avoid a high-speed collision.
Both vehicles rolled into the ditch and caught fire. Berube, with two collapsed lungs, a shattered hip, broken femur and several broken ribs, managed to drag himself from the flaming vehicle, but the boys couldn’t get out.
“In his victim impact statement, Mr. Berube remembered struggling against his rescuers as they dragged him away from the burning truck and the two boys still trapped inside,” appeal court judge James MacPherson wrote. “He described at one point breaking free of their grasp and attempting to return to his vehicle, only to find himself again being pulled away.”
“Mr. Berube recalled watching the truck explode and described the vision of his 12-year-old son Mason engulfed in flames as his last memory of his son.”
A passenger in Kummer’s truck also died.
Much like Muzzo, Kummer had a record of driving offences that didn’t rise to the level of criminality, but showed previous habits of recklessness. In 2007, after consuming three drinks and allergy medication, he drove on to the runway at the London airport and caused $127,000 in damage. Muzzo has 12 traffic convictions, mostly for speeding.
In a few cases, sentences in fatal impaired cases have been longer than eight years.
In 2015, New Brunswick’s Court of Appeal upheld a 10-year sentence for Boyd Atkinson, who killed Kathy Horsman, a single mother of two children, aged 16 and eight at the time. Horsman had pulled over in an attempt to avoid Atkinson, who was driving erratically on a street in Moncton. At the time of the collision, Atkinson was driving 136 km/h in a 60 km/h zone, and accelerating. Samples showed that he had over three times the blood-alcohol threshold to be criminally charged with drunk driving.
One factor that led the court to take a harsh view of Atkinson’s case, however, was his previous record of four drunk driving convictions.
The maximum sentence for impaired driving causing death is imprisonment for life. In the New Brunswick judgment, appeal court judge J.C. Mark Richard took the view that a life sentence is a real option in extreme cases.
“The objective severity of the offence is reflected by its maximum punishment of imprisonment for life, which contemplates there are cases where such a sentence could be imposed,” he wrote.
In a 2015 case, the Supreme Court upheld a six-and-half-year sentence given to Tommy Lacasse, a 20-year-old Quebec man convicted after a 2011 crash that killed two of his back seat passengers. The case affirmed judges’ discretion to give harsher sentences than the normal range if they felt it was warranted. That case will give judges confidence that the appeal courts will tend to respect their original sentence, if it falls above or below the usual range.
In other recent cases of impaired driving causing death:
- Eight years for a 2009 Toronto crash that killed three people. The perpetrator in that case was driving about 200 km/h in a 60 km/h zone, and sliced the victims’ minivan in two
- Five years for a 2012 Toronto crash that killed two people
- Five years for a Pembroke, Ont., dentist who killed a father of three in 2011
- Six years for a southwestern Ontario woman who killed a man driving a farm tractor in 2011 (That sentence is being appealed, the London Free Press reports)
On average, about 150 people are charged with impaired driving causing death in Canada each year.
In general, sentences for impaired driving have been rising in Canada over the years. The average sentence for impaired driving offences in general in Ontario included 47 days in jail in 1994, but by 2012, that had risen to 77.
Of the 190 federal inmates currently serving time for impaired driving causing death, 92 per cent were serving sentences of six years or less, according to data released to Global News Wednesday by Corrections Canada. Sixteen offenders in federal prisons are serving sentences of six years or more for impaired driving causing death, specifically.
Federal inmates serving time for impaired driving causing death
Graph shows sentences these inmates are serving for impaired driving causing death specifically. Their total sentence may also include prison time for other offences.
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