In the evening of November 17, 2001, Aaron Webster was killed in Stanley Park. Last week, a youth court judge heard the case against the first of five defendants.
The circumstances of the assault were brutal. Webster had been on a gay stroll in the park. The accused was one of five young men who had set out for Stanley Park armed with weapons, with the express intention of beating someone up. This was their third foray into the park to beat up on the men they found there. They hid in the bushes, and when Webster walked by, they jumped him, knocked him to the ground, and beat him with baseball bats and golf clubs, and kicked him, even after he was unconscious, till he was dead. His body was found shortly afterwards by a friend of his who was in the area.
The sentencing provisions of the Criminal Code specify that if a crime is motivated by hatred on the grounds such as race, religion, and sexual orientation, the sentence should be increased. But in this instance the Crown did not allege that the crime was a hate crime. Their rationale for not doing so was that the youth, who confessed to the assault, said that the five of them had gone to the park for the purpose of beating up peeping toms who watched couples make out in their cars. Because the accused did not specifically say that his purpose was to assault someone because he was gay, reasoned the Crown, it could not prove that the crime was a hate crime.
The Crown had originally set out to have the youth 'raised' to adult court, so that he would be subject to the more severe sentences in that court. But in exchange for the youth's agreement to confess to the crime, the Crown abandoned that intention and settled for trying the youth in youth court, where the maximum sentence is three years.
The judge disagreed with the Crown that the crime was not a hate crime. In a decision released December 18, Judge Romilly compared the actions of the five youth to the behaviour of Nazi Youth in the early years of the Nazi regime in Germany. He noted that the assault was premeditated - the young men had taken weapons with them. Because they acted as a gang, it did not matter whose blow had caused the death.
The judge said: "I am of the opinion that this crime was motivated by "bias, prejudice or hate based" on a factor similar to sexual orientation and is covered by this section of the Criminal Code. It strikes me that this section contemplates hatred against "peeping toms" and/or "voyeurs" as being within its purview, since in my opinion such activity represents a sexual lifestyle which some may consider deviant, but is a sexual lifestyle all the same. I have been advised that the media has been describing this incident as a "gay-bashing" with no foundation for saying so. On this point I find it incredible that the accused and his friends who were obviously in the habit of visiting the park to "beat up" peeping toms" and "voyeurs" were so naive that they did not notice that this area was frequented by gays. In any event a gay person was "bashed" by the accused and his friends in an area reputedly frequented by gays, and in that regard I fail to see why it cannot be regarded as a "gay bashing." The attack was cowardly and so brutal that it caused the death of Aaron Webster. This was a random, unprovoked attack by a group of strangers on a hapless victim who did not even fight back. The young person confessed one and a half years later and after there were rumours around his school of his involvement. He even denied it at first. The accused and his friends were in the habit of taking weapons in their vehicle with the purpose of seeking out certain innocent male victims and assaulting them." In sentencing the youth to the maximum three years under the Young Offenders Act, the judge imposed a sentence longer than either the defence or the Crown had recommended. The other four individuals involved are still awaiting trial. The above documents are published in Adobe® Acrobat PDF format to allow for viewing across different computer platforms: Windows PC, MAC, Linux.
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