Judge grants time served for robbery

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/07/2023 (1163 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A judge sided with the defence in a Brandon street robbery case where lawyers argued over the racial motivations underpinning the crime.

Gregory Stevens, 50, who was found guilty of armed robbery last year, will be released after Judge Patrick Sullivan sentenced him to time served in provincial court Thursday afternoon.

The Crown had asked the judge to sentence Stevens to three years behind bars, while Stevens’ defence lawyer, Brett Gladstone, asked for time served. Stevens had spent 16 months in custody prior to sentencing.

On Dec. 21, 2022, Sullivan, also the trial judge for Stevens’ case, delivered his decision, finding Stevens guilty of armed robbery for an incident in Brandon in August of that year. In his decision, the judge summarized the evidence presented at the trial.

On Aug. 23, 2022, a man who had arrived in Canada from India in 2021 was out for a walk-in downtown Brandon near the CIBC branch. While he was walking, Stevens began to yell at him from across the street. “F— you, go back to your country,” Stevens yelled.

The victim testified that he initially ignored the comments and started to walk down Ninth Street toward the Real Canadian Superstore.

Not long after, Stevens, riding his bicycle, came up beside the victim, who was talking to his mother on his cellphone.

The victim testified that Stevens got off his bike and said to the victim, “F— you, give me the money you have.” The victim said that Stevens took off the chain he had been wearing. He testified that the chain, which was a chain folded in half fashioned with a handle made out of electrical tape and hooks that were attached to the two broken ends of the chain, appeared to him at the time to have been a knife.

The victim said that Stevens held the object out in front of him as he approached him, saying, “F— you, this is my land, go back to your country. Give me the money you have.”

The victim testified that Stevens repeated this phrase several times.

Fearful by Stevens approaching him with the object, the victim dialed 911 and showed Stevens the 911 call on his phone. At this point, Stevens fled, and headed south on Ninth Street.

The victim told the court that he wanted to get somewhere safe, so he headed to the Popeye’s on 10th Street. He said that once he was on 10th Street, he saw Stevens going into a house on 10th Street with his bike.

During the trial, Stevens testified that his friend had been bear-sprayed and he was panhandling to get money to buy milk to ease his friend’s symptoms. Stevens denied brandishing a weapon at the victim. He denied making any racist comments.

He also denied that the bicycle chain was a weapon. Instead, Stevens said that he thought that the chain looked cool on his leather jacket, and that it added to the rock ’n’ roll look. He said he used the chain to convert his jacket into a backpack, by fitting the hooks into holes in his jacket.

In the reasons for his decision in finding Stevens guilty, Sullivan said that he did not believe Stevens’ evidence. The judge said that Stevens explanation for the chain was not plausible and that its only purpose would be for use as a weapon. He also said that Stevens’ explanation for why he was asking the man for money didn’t “have the ring of truth.”

“This was not a polite request for change,” Sullivan said. “This was a demand for money, accompanied by swears directed at [the victim], racial slurs, and the weapon held in his hand outstretched.”

During sentencing submissions, the court heard from a new witness: Dr. Sara Spevack, a psychologist who works for Manitoba Justice. She testified that she completed tests with Stevens while he was in jail. She said that Stevens’ results resemble people who have been diagnosed with FASD.

Though she could not make an official FASD diagnosis, she said that Stevens has significant cognitive limitations that make it difficult him to determine consequences and make him impulsive. She said that he would struggle with daily activities that most other adults would be able to do.

She said that Stevens’ lowest score was in verbal comprehension, which meant that he has difficulty understanding what other people tell him as well as communicating with others.

Spevack testified that an IQ test placed him in a percentile in which 99.9 per cent of people will score higher than him.

“These deficits clearly impacted his decision making on that day when the crime occurred, as they impact his decision making every day,” Spevack said.

During a cross-examination that Sullivan would describe in his sentencing decision as “vigorous,” Crown attorney Rich Lonstrup focused on questions that questioned the credibility of the testing.

Lonstrup asked if there were any safeguards on the test to be certain that someone wasn’t deliberately underperforming. Spevack said that it would take a sophisticated person to intentionally score badly in a way that wouldn’t be obvious to the test assessor. If someone failed easy questions but succeeded on harder questions, a test assessor would be suspicious, she said.

“But if the converse were true, and someone seemed to be doing poorly on all except the very easiest, most baseline questions, that really doesn’t take a lot of sophistication, does it?” Lonstrup said.

Lonstrup also reviewed portions of the transcript of the trial, which he said suggested that Stevens could control his impulses and that he could speak eloquently.

“We can agree that his conditions don’t make him racist or make him prone to making comments like this that have a deeply racist or xenophobic nature, right?” Lonstrup said.

Spevack agreed.

The Crown attorney asked the doctor if she thought Stevens falsified his test answers to get himself a better result in court.

Spevack said she did not believe he did so.

Lonstrup focused his final submissions on the seriousness of the crime, compounded by racist and xenophobic motives. He pointed to the victim impact statement in which the victim worries for the safety of his family as well as himself.

“It is not just making the community at large feel unsafe, it potentially makes a very specific community feel very unsafe,” Lonstrup said.

The prosecutor said that newcomers have enriched the community of Brandon and that the sentence should make a statement about the consequences of racial or xenophobic motivations to crimes.

“The message in this court has to be that if you want to send the opposite message and you are prepared to reduce yourself to violence to get that message across, you have deeply offended our core Canadian values,” he said.

Gladstone focused his submissions on reiterating that Spevack’s tests were credible and that his client’s cognitive challenges affected his moral culpability. He referenced Stevens’ additional challenges as an 50-year-old Indigenous man who survived the residential school system.

He disagreed with the Crown, and said that the motivation for the robbery was not racially motivated.

“The motivation was to obtain money, but motivation in and of itself was not racial hatred,” Gladstone said.

The defence lawyer said he saw the case as a robbery case and as an FASD case and said that this was the first time that Stevens could get support for FASD, as a result of the testing for this case.

“If 50 years ago, when FASD was just being discovered, if somebody thought to do an assessment for this gentleman, who unfortunately was essentially hiding in the bush to get away from residential schools,” Gladstone said, adding that Stevens fell through the cracks of supports and resources his entire life.

During sentencing on Thursday, Sullivan said that Stevens’ offence was at the “other end of the spectrum” of a racially motivated crime like a neo-nazi burning a synagogue.

The judge acknowledged the seriousness of the crime and the effects on the victim and cited Spevack’s evidence of the challenges with impulsivity and communication that Stevens experiences.

“[Stevens] is very low functioning and who, in the course of making some poor decisions, blurted out the comment that he did, likely without much consideration to his meaning,” Sullivan said.

Ultimately, the judge sentenced Stevens to time served along with a one-year term of supervised probation.

Lonstrup asked the judge to impose a condition to prohibit the man from panhandling, but the judge denied the suggestion.

“For someone who struggles as he does, it may put him in a position where he’s finding himself back here for some similar interaction,” Sullivan said. “However, I am also live to the fact that it may be his only way of providing or his primary means of supporting himself.”

The judge ordered forfeiture of the chain weapon, but the Crown took no issue with Stevens’ leather jacket being returned to him.

» gmortfield@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @geena_mortfield