Aaron Webster - Prosecution

Prosecution

The crime went unsolved for over a year. On February 12, 2003, police arrested the first of four suspects, a 19-year-old from Burnaby. Under Canada's Youth Criminal Justice Act, his name could not be published as he was only 17 at the time of the incident.

Although the police investigated the crime as a gay bashing, the prosecutor chose not to prosecute the case as an anti-gay hate crime, which under Canadian law would have permitted a stiffer sentence but may have been more difficult to prove — instead, the case was treated as a simple manslaughter resulting from a robbery. The teenager pled guilty and told the police investigator that "the idea was to find, get in a fight with someone."

Three more young men were subsequently arrested. One, a youth when the crime was committed, was charged under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, and the other two, Ryan Cran and Danny Rao, were charged as adults.

Judge Valmond Romilly rejected the prosecution's assertion that the incident was not a hate crime, finding the first teenager guilty and calling the incident "a thug brigade, stalking human prey for entertainment in a manner very reminiscent of Nazi youth in pre-war Germany". Romilly handed down the maximum sentence permissible under the Act: two years in a youth detention centre and a third year under house arrest. The second young offender was also found guilty and sentenced to the same penalty, although the judge in that trial did not rule that the case constituted a hate crime.

Justice Mary Humphries ruled Cran guilty of manslaughter and sentenced him to six years in prison, but acquitted Rao on the grounds that inconsistent and conflicting testimony made his role in the attack unclear.