High court upholds Alberta officer's sentence

[CHIMO]

The Supreme Court of Canada has upheld a mandatory four-year sentence for an Alberta police officer found guilty in the fatal shooting of a suspect.

The important test case of mandatory minimum sentences involved an Alberta RCMP officer, Constable Michael Esty Ferguson, who inadvertently killed a drunken, unruly prisoner during a station house scuffle on Oct. 3, 1999.

Constable Ferguson maintained that he shot the 26-year-old victim, Darren Varley, twice in self-defence. While the jury rejected the self-defence argument at his 2004 trial, it also declined to find him guilty of murder. Instead, it found him guilty of manslaughter with a firearm.

In a unanimous ruling today, the Court said that the mandatory sentence was not so “grossly disproportionate” as to justify departing from a law specifically drafted by Parliament to prevent judges using their own view of a case to impose a lower sentence.