After he was charged with possessing child pornography, Nathan Allen Joseph Legault discovered a figure from his past he hoped might help with his future.
The Prince Rupert, B.C., man — a former Baptist associate pastor — learned that a great-great-grandmother had been Métis, and based on that distant connection he asked for the special consideration Canada’s highest court mandates for sentencing Indigenous offenders.
The judge who heard the case ultimately found that Legault had nothing in his life experience as a newly self-identified Indigenous person to lessen the “moral blameworthiness” he bore for sending graphic images of himself to teenage girls.
Judge David Patterson didn’t rule on whether Legault is or is not actually Métis — that’s not his job. But in reluctantly ordering a sentence that will see the 30-year-old avoid hard jail time, he warned that courts need to deal with non-Indigenous offenders trying to game the system.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Prince Rupert, B.C., man — a former Baptist associate pastor — learned that a great-great-grandmother had been Métis, and based on that distant connection he asked for the special consideration Canada’s highest court mandates for sentencing Indigenous offenders.
The judge who heard the case ultimately found that Legault had nothing in his life experience as a newly self-identified Indigenous person to lessen the “moral blameworthiness” he bore for sending graphic images of himself to teenage girls.
“A tsunami is coming; driven by the desire of non-Indigenous people to get what they perceive to be the benefits of identifying as Indigenous,” Patterson said as he handed Legault a conditional sentence of two years less a day.
The lengthy ruling is notable both for the judge’s deep dive into questions of Indigenous identity and his misgivings about a deal between defence and the Crown he feared was “not only unduly lenient but also has the potential to bring the administration of justice into disrepute.”
Patterson called the problem of “trying to define who is entitled to self-identity as Métis in criminal court” a “quagmire” — quoting extensively from a report on Indigenous identity fraud drawn up for the University of Saskatchewan.
Patterson said he was required to look “deeper into the realities” of Legault’s life experience to consider factors like poverty and the impact of residential schools, colonialism, racism and loss of connection with Indigenous heritage.
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