‘Unduly long and harsh’

Reduced sentence for John Joseph MacArthur’s ashtray, brass knuckle beatings

An appeals court judge has reduced the prison sentence for a P.E.I. man who was found guilty of assaulting another man with an ashtray and brass knuckles in two separate incidents. In a Court of Appeal decision handed down last week, Justice John Mitchell reduced John Joseph MacArthur’s total sentence from the two incidents to sixand-a-half years after stating the original sentence of eight years was “unduly long and harsh.” In June 2017, MacArthur was sentenced by two different judges for two separate assaults. Those sentences, one for four and a half years and a second for three and a half years, came only a day apart. Mitchell wrote he found the second judge had made an error when applying the principle of totality in the sentencing. The principle of totality requires a sentencing court to reduce a sentence that may be seen as appropriate if viewed in isolation, but which could collectivity amount to a sentence that is “unduly long.” Mitchell wrote while the sentencing judge was dealing with only one offence, “that does not mean that she could completely ignore the four and half year sentence imposed the previous day.” “While the offences were separate in time, they were related because the victim of both offences was the same person,” wrote Mitchell. “In any event, even if they were completely separate incidents occurring at a separate time, the fact of a four and half year sentence imposed the day before cries out for consideration of the totality principle.” Last June 29, MacArthur was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison after being convicted of robbery, assault with a weapon and possession of a prohibited weapon. That sentence stemmed from a robbery at the victim’s home in Summerside in the fall of 2015. The following day, on June 30, MacArthur was sentenced by a different judge to three and a half years in prison for assault causing bodily harm.

In that incident, MacArthur and a co-accused had attacked the same victim in March 2016. MacArthur hit the victim with an ashtray, stripped him naked and then continued to beat him with unknown objects for more than 15 minutes. The victim had suffered broken ribs, black eyes and “bruising and abrasions all over his body.” In last week’s decision, Mitchell reduced the second sentence from three and a half years to two consecutive years to make the total sentence for the two offences six and a half years. He noted MacArthur has a long criminal record consisting of some 32 offenses from 1996 to 2016. “If this was a standalone offence, a three-and-a-half-year sentence would not be outside the reasonable range given the violent nature of the offence and MacArthur’s long criminal record,” wrote Mitchell. “However, when one couples the three-anda-half-year sentence imposed by the sentencing judge with the four-and-a-half-year sentence imposed the day before, the total is eight years. In my view a total of eight years for these offences is unduly long and harsh.”