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TORONTO — A three-year mandatory minimum sentence for gun possession is “cruel and unusual punishment,” Ontario’s top court ruled Tuesday in striking down a plank of the Harper government’s law-and-order agenda.

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The sentencing law, enacted as part of the Conservatives’ 2008 omnibus bill, could see people sent to prison for three years for what would amount to a licence violation, the Court of Appeal for Ontario ruled.

In that scenario, there is a “cavernous disconnect” between the severity of such an offence and the severity of the sentence, the court ruled.

The law as written could capture anyone from a person keeping an unloaded restricted gun, with ammunition accessible, in their cottage when their licence requires it to be in their home, to a person standing on a street corner with a loaded gun in his back pocket “which he intends to use as he sees fit,” the court said.

No system of criminal justice that would make exposure to a draconian mandatory minimum penalty … could pretend to have any fidelity to the search for the truth

“No system of criminal justice that would resort to punishments that ‘outrage standards of decency’ in the name of furthering the goals of deterrence and denunciation could ever hope to maintain the respect and support of its citizenry,” the court ruled.

“Similarly, no system of criminal justice that would make exposure to a draconian mandatory minimum penalty, the cost an accused must pay to go to trial on the merits of the charge, could pretend to have any fidelity to the search for the truth in the criminal justice system.”