TORONTO

With great power comes greater responsibility.

So when Const. James Forcillo stands before the judge in a downtown courtroom Thursday morning for his long-awaited sentencing, he should hear that he is heading to prison — and not house arrest — for the attempted murder of teen Sammy Yatim almost exactly three years before.

Superior Court Justice Edward Then would be sending a powerful message that many in Toronto are anxiously waiting to hear: That police officers are not above the law, that they deserve no special treatment if they use excessive force while exercising their duties.

That unlike so many of his colleagues who have managed to evade real punishment, Forcillo will be handcuffed and imprisoned for firing six bullets at a kid already down and dying on a streetcar floor.

There are few in this city who have not watched the shocking shooting captured from all angles on cellphone video and on-board TTC cameras: Yatim, armed with a switchblade, high on MDMA, waving his knife and exposing his penis as he chased all the passengers off the streetcar that summer night.

From the radio call, Forcillo knew only that there was a passenger armed with a knife and that no one had been injured. But following just 50 seconds on the scene, after yelling repeatedly at the 18-year-old to drop the knife, he began shooting. A jury acquitted him of murder for discharging the first three hollow point bullets that felled Yatim and ultimately proved fatal. They accepted Forcillo’s argument that the teen posed an imminent threat.

But they found no justification for what the hothead did next: He paused for just over five seconds and then fired at the dying teen six more times, missing only once. For that, they convicted him of attempted murder and unluckily for him, because he used a restricted firearm, the crime carries a mandatory minimum sentence of five years.

Will a Toronto cop actually go to prison for at least five years because a judge’s hands are tied by a mandatory sentence enacted by Parliament? Or could Forcillo evade jail altogether because Then agrees with his lawyers that the five-year minimum is unconstitutional and shouldn’t apply to police officers?

His counsel argued the five-year minimum is “grossly disproportionate” and was never meant for cops who by law must be armed with restricted weapons. Forcillo wasn’t some thug with a stolen handgun who deserves a stiffer sentence because of the scourge of guns in our society, they insisted, but a cop duty-bound to take action in a dangerous stand-off whose “misperception” led to the second volley of bullets from his legally-issued Glock.

While the Crown has asked for a prison term of eight to 10 years, the defence urged Then to sentence the father of two to a conditional term of house arrest for two years less a day.

Imagine the uproar if Forcillo were to actually get that absurd sentence. He could get lucky: Judges don’t like mandatory minimums — Then said as much during the five-day sentencing hearing in May, decrying the lack of discretion it leaves him. Over the last few years, the Supreme Court has thrown out many of the law-and-order mandatory terms as unconstitutional.

The problem for Forcillo, though, is that Canada’s highest court has upheld a four-year mandatory minimum sentence for an RCMP officer convicted of manslaughter with a firearm. He received no special leniency just because he was a cop.

Nor should Forcillo. Society entrusts our police with tremendous power — arming them with guns, giving them the right to detain and arrest. In return, we can demand that they use that power with the utmost caution and responsibility.

And when they fail — as Forcillo so clearly did — and that force is excessive and unreasonable, they don’t then get to claim yet another privilege and insist that they should escape the kind of penalty the rest of us would receive. Instead, you could argue that given their position of trust, their punishment should be even more harsh.

But don’t hold your breath.

mmandel@postmedia.com