“Honey, he’s given me a year.”

That was James Sears, editor of the vile freebie tabloid Your Ward News, as he turned from the bench on Thursday afternoon to speak with his wife, who’d just re-entered the courtroom with the couple’s young son on her hip — a prop.

Before the court officer was able to slap on the cuffs, Sears dug inside his briefcase to retrieve an object. “I’m going to keep my crucifix with me.”

And as several supporters grumbled their disapproval of the sentence which had just been delivered by Ontario Court Judge Richard Blouin — “Welcome to North Korea” — Sears took his cheery leave. “See you, guys.”

At appeal court, no doubt.

Although it’s hard to reckon how Blouin’s verdict in the judge-alone trial, and his two six-month sentences — to run consecutively — for promoting hatred against women and Jews in the pages of Your Ward News could be overturned, given the lengths to which the judge went to make his decision appeal-proof. Including the permission granted for Sears to argue for a mistrial or retrial because his defence lawyer had provided “ineffective representation” at trial by failing to call expert witnesses or launching a constitutional challenge to a section of the Criminal Code dealing with hate laws.

As the case ground on — sentencing was originally scheduled for May 29 — an exactingly patient Blouin gave Sears remarkable latitude to argue, re-argue, really, his case, after Sears had declined to take the stand in his own defence at trial, which was his right.

But Sears filed a heap o’ documents, including a 38-page affidavit with a fistful of emails between himself and his since fired lawyer, Dean Embry, to show, he claimed, that Embry had disregarded his wishes on multiple issues of tactical dispute. Like, you know, the Crown’s failure to establish a “clear legal definition of a ‘Jew’ … in relation to RELIGIOUS ‘Jews’ or ETHNIC ‘Jews.’ Likewise Embry’s purported refusal to call experts on political and religious satire and, um, trolls, which Sears professed to be.

“Mr. Embry refused to call any expert witnesses, claiming he could magically elicit a defence by merely cross-examining the Crown’s experts,” Sears said in his affidavit. “I never agreed with this defeatist approach, but I reluctantly acquiesced because I am not a lawyer and every time I suggested calling a defence expert. Mr. Embry became belligerent, and at time condescending to the brink of verbal abuse.”

For his part, Embry filed a counter affidavit strenuously refuting his former client’s accusations. “I unequivocally deny Mr. Sears’ allegation that I ‘threw the case.’ To the contrary, at all times I defended Mr. Sears to the best of my ability and in accordance with the ethics of the profession. I am proud of the work I did for him.”

Embry, however, had pointed out to Sears that “there was no such thing as a ‘national’ Jewish person, the definition that Sears had sought. He also dissuaded Sears — and Sears, he said, agreed — that it would be foolhardy to reference pop culture sources in his closing submissions about the Rothschilds, a famous Jewish banking family. Lord Rothschild was depicted in YWN as the Satanic leader of an international conspiracy and drinking the blood of children.

“Mr. Sears insisted that Mr. Burns from the Simpsons was based on Rothschild, that the song ‘If I Were a Rich Man’ from Fiddler on the Roof was originally called ‘If I were a Rothschild’ and The Wizard of Oz was actually a coded reference to Rothschild … In my professional judgment, none of these arguments would advance Mr. Sears’ defence.”

Just so you get the drift of Sears’ sensibilities.

Blouin read all the materials, listened again on Wednesday as Sears mounted oral arguments, and then, finally, in civil courtroom language, basically told Sears to take a hike.

“Your motion is denied.”

On the specific matter of Sears’ about-face on his previously trusted lawyer, Blouin observed: “This was not incompetence or worse. This was a lawyer doing his job. It just didn’t work.”

Hate laws are on the books and Sears violated them.

“Mr. Sears should be free to publish whatever he wishes, even if unpopular or objectionable. As long as his words do not offend the Criminal Code,” the judge said in court.

Blouin did not forbid the continuing publication of Your Ward News, but the bits that got Sears into trouble have been removed from the archives (though those 22 back issues are still accessible via online “private communication.”)

Both Sears, 55, and Your Ward News publisher Leroy St. Germaine were found guilty in January of wilful promotion of hatred against Jews and women.

“To summarize,” Blouin wrote in the sentencing decision released Thursday, “the publication glorified Nazism and Adolf Hitler, and denied the Holocaust. It consistently blamed, demonized and maligned Jews. Women were represented as inferior, immoral, and less than human. Physical and sexual violations against them were counselled and celebrated.”

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I choose not to revisit, in detail, the myriad examples of hatred in the toe-rag YWN entered as exhibits at trial. The publication landed on the doorstep of some 300,000 homes in southern Ontario — but mostly east-end Toronto — whether those households wanted it or not.

Under the rules of proceeding by summary conviction rather than indictment, which the Crown elected — no jury, for one thing, no preliminary inquiry — the maximum sentence was six months on each conviction. That’s what the Crown sought and got.

“It’s always good to see a case concluded,” Crown attorney Jamie Klukach told reporters afterwards about this interminable legal matter. “We felt it was appropriate to ask for the maximum in this case.”

Blouin leaned on Court of Appeal decisions that concurrent sentences need not be given when the offences “constitute invasions of different legally-protected interests.” To wit, Jews and women. “He promoted hatred against both,” the judge wrote. “In addition, the hate was promoted against both groups not from one incident, but many, and consistently over a period of three years.”

Among the aggravating factors: “This was not a situation of a pamphlet distributed by hand, but a publication with a purported readership of over one million, and an online presence.

The Winter 2019 edition, Blouin noted, kept right on trucking with its hateful themes, including solicitations for men to sit on the steering committee of the “Adolf Hitler Fan Club” — and that issue was published after the trial had begun.

Blouin also accepted seven community impact statements, from the likes of the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre and the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies.

Embry had argued those statements documented possible harm but not actual harm. “I disagree,” Blouin wrote. “Promotion of hate destroys human rights and civil society. Whether any further harm occurred from this publication has not yet been determined. But make no mistake, harm has already been caused to the community.”

The judge added: “The promotion of hatred against women requires, at the very least, a similar sentence. In some ways, the hate promoted is even more aggravating because not only are women de-humanized, but criminal offences against them are trumpeted.”

Blouin said he would have come down harder in the sentencing, if the law permitted it.

“It is impossible, in my view, to conclude that Mr. Sears … should receive a sentence of any less than 18 months in jail. “Mr. Sears … promoted hate to a vast audience in an era where online exposure to this material inexorably leads to extremism and the potential of mass casualties.”

So, one year incarceration, though Sears can apply for parole after completing a third of his sentence.

He claimed it was all sophomoric humour, ha-ha, never to be taken seriously. He’s not laughing now.

St. Germaine, the septuagenarian who founded Your Ward News and hired Sears, will be sentenced next week.