Overwhelming number of victim-impact statements delays Cooper Nemeth case

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This article was published 14/01/2018 (2536 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The shock and sadness that rippled through the city after a missing 17-year-old boy was found dead nearly two years ago has reached Manitoba’s Court of Queen’s Bench via an unmatched outpouring of grief from family and friends, who submitted far more victim-impact statements than the court is used to seeing for a single case.

There were 96 victim-impact statements submitted from people whose lives were touched by Cooper Nemeth, who was killed under the guise of a drug deal in February 2016.

The 17-year-old was shot in the head by an acquaintance he met through the Winnipeg drug trade. In the week before Cooper’s body was found, more than 500 volunteers joined citywide search efforts hoping the River East Collegiate student and River East Marauders hockey player would be found safe.

The sentencing for his killer, 24-year-old Nicholas Bell-Wright, was delayed Monday after Court of Queen’s Bench Chief Justice Glenn Joyal aired his concerns about the sheer volume of victim-impact statements.

“(It is) something that I’ve never seen and most judges have never seen,” he said.

The delay didn’t faze Cooper’s parents.

“We are willing to wait,” to ensure court hears the victim-impact statements, Cooper’s mother, Gaylene Nemeth, said Monday outside court.

“They’re all important,” said his dad, Brent Nemeth.

The statements become part of the court record in criminal cases across Canada. In homicide cases, they typically allow the victim’s immediate family to tell the judge how the death has affected them emotionally, psychologically, physically and, sometimes, financially.

They could pose a problem, Joyal said Monday, if there’s a public perception his decision on Bell-Wright’s fate is swayed too heavily by the hefty number of victim accounts in this case.

In November, Bell-Wright pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, meaning he faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison. The only question is how long he’ll have to wait before he can apply for parole — from a minimum of 10 years to a maximum of 25.

Joyal will have to decide after he hears arguments from Crown and defence lawyers. But those arguments were delayed Monday, and they can’t begin until the court sorts out the victim-impact statement issue.

“Some degree of limitation has to be set up so as to avoid the appearance that the victim-impact statements are going to have a disproportionate effect,” Joyal said. He asked the Crown to reduce the number of victim-impact statements that will end up before the court, stressing he’ll still get a “broad sense of consternation and grief on the part of extended members of the community.”

However, Crown attorney Keith Eyrikson said the prosecutions office has instructed him not to pick and choose.

Eyrikson didn’t indicate who authored the 96 statements, but he told court federal legislation prevents the Crown from culling victim-impact statements.

Under the Canadian Victims Bill of Rights, introduced in 2015, a victim has the right to present a victim-impact statement to court. If the victim is dead, their relative, spouse, dependant or guardian has the right to act on their behalf.

The statements could be limited by that legal definition of a victim, said Marie Manikis, an assistant professor of law at McGill University who has studied the relevance of victim-impact statements in Canada.

There’s also the option under the Criminal Code for a “community-impact statement” to be submitted to the court, she said. But no matter the number of victim-impact statements, the judge has to consider them in proportion to the overall case, Manikis wrote in an email to the Free Press.

“The harm described in those victim-impact statements – regardless of the number of statements provided — should not escalate the severity of the sentence to an excessive degree, since proportionality is the paramount principle of sentencing in Canadian law. Finally, victims are not meant to provide their opinions regarding parole eligibility in those statements and therefore it is difficult to see how there may be an appearance of disproportionate weight given to these statements in relation to parole illegibility,” she wrote.

A hearing has been set for next week in which the Crown and defence lawyer Barry Sinder will go through all of the statements and decide which ones can be submitted to the court.

Only after that can Bell-Wright be sentenced.

“I want the sentencing to proceed as early as it can,” Joyal said. “The family deserves closure. The accused deserves clarity, and the community, frankly, deserves some end to this awful tragedy. And that will happen only once the sentencing has occurred.”

Cooper was last seen alive leaving a house party in the early morning hours of Feb. 14, 2016, when he got into Bell-Wright’s 1997 grey Cadillac DeVille. Bell-Wright admitted shooting Cooper twice while he was in the car.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay