“Judge reduces sex criminal’s jail time because of his race,” reports The National Post:
A former university football player who sexually assaulted two women has been sentenced to just two years in prison because he is black and was feeling intense pressure around the time of the attacks, the judge said.
Omogbolahan Jegede, 25, had choked one of the women almost into unconsciousness.
“It should be noted that but, for the contents of the Impact of Race and Culture Assessment (IRCA), the pre-sentence report and all the mitigating factors surrounding Omogbolahan (Teddy) Jegede, this sentence would have been much higher,” Justice Frank Hoskins said in his Nova Scotia Supreme Court decision on Wednesday.
The women were attacked in residences at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, N.S., in 2022 and 2023. One woman testified that Jegede choked her; one woman was forced to perform oral sex. Both women said they were physically dominated by Jegede, who is much larger than they are
The Epoch Times adds:
Nigerian immigrant Omogbolahan Jegede, 25, a former university football player, was found guilty of assaulting two women in 2022 and 2023. One of the women was choked almost into unconsciousness, another was forced to perform oral sex while her movements were being forcefully controlled by him. He was sentenced to only two years in prison.
“This sentence would have been much higher,” wrote Nova Scotia Supreme Court judge Frank Hoskins, had it not been for the “Impact of Race and Culture Assessment,” which claimed that Jegede “was feeling intense pressure around the time of the assaults and did not have culturally appropriate support to turn to.”
The judge noted that Jegede came from a strong, church-going family with strict parents who had stable professional careers…Jegede told the court he grew up feeling loved by his supportive family.
Jegede was born in Lagos, Nigeria and moved with his family to Canada at the age of 10…The Impact of Race and Culture Assessment asserts that Jegede “struggled with a sense of isolation” being a black man in the predominantly white university town of Antigonish, where he attended St. Francis Xavier University….
The Impact of Race and Culture Assessment was developed in 2014, and began receiving federal funding under the Trudeau government in 2021 to the tune of $6.6 million tax dollars over five years, with more funding thereafter, to implement these assessments in courts across Canada.
Section 3(b) of the Judges Act requires federally appointed judges to take ideological training seminars in “social context” including “systemic racism and systemic discrimination.”
Obviously, anyone who commits serious violent crimes is mentally and emotionally disturbed, to say the least. Canadian judges take the offender’s background and circumstances into account when imposing sentences. A high percentage of offenders of all races and ethnicities have experienced various hardships, many of them severe, in childhood. Giving special consideration to skin colour is the epitome of racism and the repudiation of the rule of law.
The practice of giving offenders lower sentences based on their race was given a boost by the Canadian Supreme Court’s decision in R. v. Gladue, which endorsed giving some minority offenders lower sentences. It rejected a sentence for an aboriginal Canadian that would have been quite typical or even lenient for a white defendant. The Canadian Supreme Court said that “Sentencing must proceed with sensitivity to and understanding of the difficulties aboriginal people have faced with…the criminal justice system” and the fact that “Aboriginal people are overrepresented in virtually all aspects of the system.”
Giving offenders less punishment because their ethnic group is “overrepresented” among those punished is not the norm in the United States. Indeed, that is illegal racial discrimination. A few progressive prosecutors in the U.S., such as Mary Moriarty, the district attorney in St. Paul, Minnesota, have sought lower sentences for minority offenders, but that practice does not have the approval of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Leniency toward members of “overrepresented” groups was once mandated by a progressive trial court ruling in the U.S. But it was reversed on appeal, in a unanimous appeals court ruling. The appeals court ruled that not disciplining an offender because he is a member of an overrepresented race is itself discriminatory, even when the leniency is motivated by a desire to remedy past or present governmental discrimination:
The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a provision requiring a school district [which had been found guilty of segregation] not “to refer a higher percentage of minority students than of white students for discipline unless the district purges all ‘subjective’ criteria from its disciplinary code.” It ruled such “racial disciplinary quotas” are illegal, and “violate equity in its root sense. They entail either systematically overpunishing the innocent or systematically underpunishing the guilty.” (See People Who Care v. Rockford Board of Education, 111 F.3d 528, 538 (7th Cir. 1997))…..
Black people being investigated or punished at higher rates than whites is a racial disparity, but it is not usually discrimination, much less intentional discrimination. As the Supreme Court noted in 1996, there is no “presumption that people of all races commit all types of crimes” at the same rate, because that assumption is “contradicted by” reality. (See United States v. Armstrong, 517 U.S. 456 (1996)).
The higher black arrest rate is not due to overpolicing of black people. A 2021 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that although blacks are arrested for serious nonfatal violent crimes at much higher rate than people in general, this mostly reflected underlying crime rates: “white and black people were arrested proportionate to their involvement in serious nonfatal violent crime overall and proportionate to their involvement in serious nonfatal violent crime reported to police.” (See Allen J. Beck, Race and Ethnicity of Violent Crime Offenders and Arrestees, 2018).
Similarly, the courts have often recognized that schools are not guilty of discrimination merely because black students get punished or suspended from school at a higher rate than whites, since the higher rate may just reflect higher rates of misbehavior. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals noted that a “‘disparity does not, by itself, constitute discrimination,’” in discussing how “statistics show that of the 13,206 students disciplined from 1996–98″ in a North Carolina school district “sixty-six percent were African–American.” It added that this disparity provided “no evidence” that the school district “targets African–American students for discipline.” (See Belk v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 269 F.3d 305, 332 (4th Cir. 2001) (en banc)
Similarly, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the “assumption ‘that “undiscipline” or misbehavior is a randomly distributed characteristic among racial groups.’” (See Coalition to Save Our Children v. State Board of Education, 90 F.3d 752, 775 (3d Cir. 1996))….
The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a desegregation decree that ordered a school district to eliminate academic disparities and higher black discipline rates, explaining that “while there are references in the district judge’s opinion on liability to the underrepresentation of minority teachers (currently 8.7 percent) in the school district’s teaching staff, there is no finding that the school district has ever discriminated (by which we mean discriminated intentionally–the only kind of discrimination that violates the equal protection clause…. in the hiring, promotion, firing, assignment (to one school or another), or transfer of teachers….The magistrate judge thought he was finding intentional discrimination in hiring…but he based his finding of intentional discrimination on statistical disparities, which need not reflect discrimination, intentional or otherwise.” (People Who Care v. Rockford Board of Education, 111 F.3d 528, 534 (7th Cir. 1997)).
The Supreme Court has rejected taking race into account just because black people are overrepresented or underrepresented in something compared to their share of the population (see Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. (1989)). It recently said race can only be taken into account in “remediating specific, identified instances of past discrimination that violated the Constitution or a statute,” not generalized racial disparities. (See Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023))…..
In the workplace, certain racial disparities constitute “disparate impact” in violation of the workplace discrimination law Title VII. But many disparities don’t. For example, courts don’t consider a racial disparity between an employers’ skilled workforce and its unskilled workforce to be even a prima facie case of “disparate impact” (see Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio (1989), nor do they consider blacks’ underrepresentation in a skilled position compared to their percentage of the general population to be “disparate impact.” (see, e.g., Janowiak v. South Bend (1987)). Similarly, racial disparities in discipline rates don’t qualify as disparate impact when they don’t take into account employees’ actual behavior, such as their “prior disciplinary record.” (See Mozee v. American Commercial Marine Ins. Co. (1991)).
Such crude disparities don’t constitute “disparate impact,” because they are apples-to-oranges comparisons that ignore who is actually qualified for a job or disciplinary action. Similarly, comparing the percentage of criminal defendants who are black or male to the percentage of the population that is black or male makes no sense, because law-abiding people are not qualified for incarceration. So comparing the racial composition of the prison population to the racial composition of society is an apples-to-oranges comparison that does not establish disparate impact. Moreover, the Constitution, unlike workplace discrimination laws, forbids only purposeful discrimination, not “disparate impact.” (See Personnel Administrator of Massachusetts v. Feeney (1979)).
Considering race in punishment is also sufficiently extreme that it violates the rule that even when race can be considered by the government to remedy discrimination, the consideration of race must not “unduly trammel” a person’s rights. Courts have said that even otherwise valid affirmative action policies can be illegal when they impose a severe loss on someone, like firing a white person rather than merely denying them a promotion or reducing their odds of being hired. (See Taxman v. Board of Education of Piscataway (1996)).
It’s one thing to be given a lesser chance of getting a job because you are white. It is quite another thing to be sent to jail for years longer because you are white. That is far worse, and unduly trammels your rights.
