Great Moments in Canadian Sentencing 07.07.09

Maybe when he gets convicted for an eighth time he'll actually be punished?

"The Parliamentary intent is to address ... serious violent offences that involve maximum penalties of 10 years or more and are indictable," Brown ruled as she sentenced Francisco Amaya to nine months house arrest and two years probation.

Amaya, who has prior convictions for seven similar incidents, grabbed a stranger's buttocks inside a grocery store on in February of last year.

Read the story and you'll learn that the judge didn't like the express wording of the statute and decided to divine legislative intent by references to what the Minister of Justice said in some press conferences (presumably - all we know is "Brown said the wording flies in the face of comments made by federal Justice Minister Rob Nicholson when changes to conditional sentence legislation were introduced" - in any event, regardless of when and where the comments were made that's a fairly radical innovation in statutory interpretation).  What is it with judges in this country just willfully ignoring the wording of laws they don't like?