Decision suggests root causes of offending sometimes more insidious than offence itself

Law360 Canada (September 2, 2025, 2:49 PM EDT) --

John L. Hill

Kenneth Conrad Izzard’s name first appeared in the Vancouver Sun on Jan. 10, 2015. The news report concerned the 29-year-old’s arrest for manslaughter after the body of 49-year-old Jeffery Scott Nasa-Dyke was found in East Vancouver. Nasa-Dyke had been missing since mid-November 2014. Izzard was found guilty of using a hammer to fatally beat the drug dealer on the head over $30. Izzard was sentenced to five and a half years.

Izzard’s name surfaced again after he pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and four related offences involving weapon possession and breaching bail conditions. Izzard was sentenced in September 2024 for an unprovoked, non-life-threatening stab wound inflicted on a heroin-addicted woman at a Terrace, B.C., homeless shelter in November 2022. He stabbed the woman twice in the back after she approached Izzard’s girlfriend to offer her drugs.

The provincial court imposed a total sentence of 1,350 days, which was reduced to 790 days (almost 26 months) after credit for time already served. That sentence was appealed to the British Columbia Court of Appeal.

The Court of Appeal recognized that Izzard had a significant criminal record. However, it found that the sentencing judge had not sufficiently considered Izzard’s Indigenous and racialized background. His mother identified as Black and lived in a Black community in Toronto. She would slap him if he identified as anything other than Black. Throughout his youth, Izzard had some contact with his father, who was Indigenous and of Cree ancestry. His paternal grandmother had attended a residential school in Manitoba. She took her children, including his father, to Toronto to escape abuse from her partner, his grandfather. His father, like his mother, struggled with substance abuse. He described his late father as “alcoholic, dead beat, and a goof.”

After finishing Grade 12, Izzard moved to British Columbia. His employment history had been inconsistent, and he had struggled with cocaine and other street drugs. However, over the past three years, Izzard has established a stable common-law relationship with a woman he plans to marry. He is a father figure to her four children and has supported her recovery from drug addiction.

The unanimous appeal decision written by Justice Geoffrey Gomery stated that Izzard’s sentence in Prince George, B.C., was “marred by an error in principle.” The judge did not fully consider that Izzard was fathered by a Cree man and raised in Toronto’s Black community by a mother who became a sex worker to support her alcohol and drug addictions (R. v. Izzard, 2025 BCCA 214).

“There were pimps, guns and drugs in the home,” Gomery wrote. “Mr. Izzard suffered physical abuse from his mother and others in the house and ran away at age 15.”

The appeal ruling noted that the Crown conceded the judge’s discussion of Izzard’s background is “scant” but believed the decision would withstand appeal.

However, the Appeal Court found that a different approach to sentencing is necessary due to R. v. Gladue, [1999] 1 S.C.R. 688 and R. v. Ipeelee, 2012 SCC 13. It has been established that these decisions aim to address the ongoing over-representation of Indigenous offenders in the Canadian criminal justice system. This crisis is driven by factors such as alienation, poverty, substance abuse, lower educational attainment, reduced employment opportunities and prejudice faced by Indigenous people in Canada. The decisions require sentencing judges to acknowledge how Canada’s colonial history and post-colonial assimilationist policies have contributed to these adverse outcomes. While these systemic and background factors do not excuse or justify criminal behaviour, they provide essential context for understanding and assessing case-specific information during sentencing (R. v. Kehoe, 2023 BCCA 2).

Intergenerational marginalization by mainstream society of Indigenous and Black populations has been a key factor in their overrepresentation in our jails and prisons.

Some critics have argued that reliance on the Gladue and Ipeelee principles is like giving a “get out of jail free card” to racialized offenders. Perhaps a better perspective is that courts, such as the B.C. Court of Appeal in this case, are adopting a more enlightened approach by recognizing that the root causes of offending are more insidious than the offence itself. It is insufficient to rely solely on “denunciation and deterrence” as the guiding principles in sentencing.

The Appeal Court reduced Izzard’s sentence to 1,185 days, which amounts to 625 days after credit for time served. It also ordered a 12-month probation period. Justice Gomery stated that the shorter sentence is justified by Izzard’s moral blameworthiness, considering his background and the “guarded hope for rehabilitation.”

John L. Hill practised and taught prison law until his retirement. He holds a J.D. from Queen’s and an LL.M. in constitutional law from Osgoode Hall. His most recent book, Acts of Darkness (Durvile & UpRoute Books) was released July 1. Hill is also the author of Pine Box Parole: Terry Fitzsimmons and the Quest to End Solitary Confinement (Durvile & UpRoute Books) and The Rest of the (True Crime) Story (AOS Publishing). Contact him at johnlornehill@hotmail.com.

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