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.
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.
Sierra Beverly, 12, was killed at the scene. Her mother, Naomi, suffered debilitating brain injuries for which she still requires 24-hour care.
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.
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.
Wilson, he ruled, was suffering from cultural “disconnection” as a result of colonization, which “crystallized into the tragic events of Feb. 11, 2022.”
Wilson was convicted of dangerous driving causing death and bodily harm, a crime which can carry a maximum jail term of 14 years.
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.
The Crown had requested a prison sentence of four years, which Edward framed as a government effort to rob Wilson of his heritage.
“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.
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.”
“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.
Both the judge and the offender are members of Six Nations of the Grand River, Canada’s most populous First Nation.
Under Canadian “Gladue provisions,” first established in the 1990s, judges have been required to tailor criminal sentencing to the “circumstances” of Indigenous offenders.
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.
In 2024, he was made a visiting Indigenous scholar at Wilfrid Laurier University, with school officials declaring in a statement “we have a great deal to learn from Justice Edward’s work to decolonize Canada’s legal system.”
In addition to Gladue sentencing, this has included prior instances in which Edward removed Canadian and Ontario flags from his courtroom to placate an Indigenous witness.
In 2014, Edward ruled in favour of a Six Nations mother who wanted to stop chemotherapy for her 11-year-old daughter, who was suffering from leukemia. The mother wished instead to pursue traditional remedies.
McMaster Children’s Hospital went to court to argue that the child was being denied potentially life-saving care and was in need of state protection, but Edward ruled that the effort was a violation of the family’s constitutionally protected Aboriginal rights.
“Such a right cannot be qualified as a right only if it is proven to work by employing the Western medical paradigm. To do so would be to leave open the opportunity to perpetually erode aboriginal rights,” he wrote .
In a social media post on Sunday, former Alberta premier Jason Kenney called the sentencing decision for Darris Wilson an “absolute moral outrage,” and denounced Edward as a “robed political activist cosplaying as a judge.”
“We must stigmatize the vile theory that violent criminals are prima facie victims by virtue of their genetic profile,” he wrote.
