Khalila Mohammed had a hell of a day on July 7, 2023
. When an alleged drug-related robbery outside the Toronto supervised-injection clinic where she worked led to a shootout, in which an innocent passerby was killed, she decided to help the wounded alleged robber
(who is not accused of firing a shot, but is charged with manslaughter)
: tending to his injuries; stashing away his bloody clothes; facilitating his fleeing the scene; advising him to lay low; and lying to police about what happened. She later pursued a romantic relationship with him.
Whoops!
These are agreed facts, per Mohammed’s
plea of guilty to being an accessory to manslaughter.
Mohammed was a worker at the South Riverdale Community Health Centre and a
supporter of harm reduction and drug decriminalization
. The victim was passerby, Karolina Huebner-Makurat, by all accounts a much-beloved mother of two.
Ironically, considering her apparently beyond-reason devotion to the harm-reduction (or drug-taking?) cause, Mohammed, and indeed the clinic where she worked, also played a significant role in knocking centrist Canadians and even generally-lefty Torontonians away from harm reduction as a model for coping with the opioids crisis. Mohammed’s lawyer, the estimable Brian Greenspan,
said she developed “misplaced compassion”
even toward the people selling the clinic’s clients the garbage that supervised-injection facilities are supposed to protect them from, should they overdose on the garbage in question.
Not even a month after the shooting outside the South Riverdale Community Health Centre,
the same facility was found to be offering chocolate bars in exchange for used needles
— not just to their clients (which really isn’t a bad idea), but on a sign in their front window to the general public, effectively encouraging people (say, neighbourhood kids) to hunt down dirty drug needles.
“In an exuberance to get used needles off the street one of our staff posted a sign that was never meant for the public. In no way, shape, or form was that communication meant for children,” Jason Altenberg, CEO of the facility, bizarrely told National Post at the time.
Who is “exuberant” about cleaning up needles in the vicinity of supervised-injection facilities? One of the
selling points
of such facilities was they were supposed to lead to
fewer
used needles scattered around the neighbourhood. For myriad reasons, it hasn’t worked — or if it has, the effects have been swallowed whole by the larger opioids problem, which (fingers crossed!) reached its nadir during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Harm-reduction efforts didn’t cause this crisis. Many people who might have overdosed alone or without recourse to help have been saved at facilities like South Riverdale. And now that facility is one of many that don’t offer supervised-injection services anymore, in no small part because people like Mohammed and the rogue chocolatier lost the plot and practically begged the provincial government to shut them down,
earlier this year. So, well done, everyone.
Anyway, no word of a lie, Khalila Mohammed won’t spend a day behind bars for her astonishing series of decisions on July 7, 2023 — not unless she violates the terms of her so-called “house arrest,” which allows her to leave home for work, education, to go to the gym, for counselling, for family emergencies, to perform community service … well, OK, it’s less “house arrest” than a “regular daily routine,” but she’s not allowed to be out after 11 p.m.
The Crown, to its credit, argued for a proper custodial sentence that somewhat fit the crime: two years behind bars. “People who have done less have been put in jail. A conditional sentence is not sufficient,” prosecutor Jay Spare told Ontario Court of Justice Judge Russell Silverstein. “Denunciation and deterrence require actual jail.”
This is a crucial point that often seems lost in modern mainstream criminal-justice discussions: The notions of denunciation and deterrence aren’t relics of the Dark Ages;
they’re explicitly stated goals of criminal sentencing
. The victim’s widower, Adrian Makurat, seems to be an uncommonly forgiving and magnanimous fellow — more than I think I could be,
But that could have been anyone’s wife or mother walking along Queen Street East that day in July 2023. It could easily have been one of Mohammed’s apparently beloved clients at the health centre. This concerns all of society.
Criminal justice is usually complicated, and reactionism is often unhelpful, but neither is always the case: This “sentence” is an abomination. Someone needs to answer for it — and for many other sentences besides — and in this case, it’s not Prime Minister Mark Carney or his predecessor Justin Trudeau. Silverstein is a provincial appointment.
The maximum sentence available under the law was 14 years
in prison. Mohammed got zero, and two hours a day to work out at her local GoodLife Fitness, which — in the absence of any government or judicial action — should perhaps consider cancelling her membership.
National Post
cselley@postmedia.com
Get more deep-dive National Post political coverage and analysis in your inbox with the Political Hack newsletter, where Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson and political analyst Tasha Kheiriddin get at what’s really going on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill every Wednesday and Friday, exclusively for subscribers. Sign up here.
