People: Account Evidence and Deputy Attorney

people: The Criminal Code includes guidance that says sentences shall take into account evidence that the offence was motivated by bias, prejudice or hate based on race, national or ethnic origin, language, colour, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, or any other similar factor, according to CTV. While some people choose to call that a hate crime after the fact, hate crime is not an offence that police can charge a person with. Lawyer Mark Freiman, who served as Ontario's deputy attorney general and once prosecuted a case against Holocaust-denier Ernst Zundel, says that what many people refer to as hate crimes are cases where judges have taken a guilty person's hateful motivations into account during sentencing. A person accused of drawing swastikas may be charged with mischief, and then it's up to the judge to decide whether to impose a longer sentence if she or he believes the crime of mischief was motived by hate. The federal Department of Justice has noted this problem of definition. Complicating things further, police may or may not record that incident as a hate crime in their statistics, depending on their own policies, which vary across the country. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.