Man gets six years for one-punch manslaughter

A Halifax man with a violent past has been handed a sixyear prison sentence for manslaughter in the 2017 death of Benjamin Lokeny.

Troy Edward William Clayton, 54, was awaiting trial in Nova Scotia Supreme Court next month on a charge of second-degree murder.

Clayton pleaded guilty to the lesser offence Feb. 11 and was sentenced Friday in Halifax by Associate Chief Justice Patrick Duncan.

The judge deducted 1,016 days for remand credit, leaving Clayton with a net sentence of about three years and 80 days.

The facts of the offence were “uncomplicated,” Duncan said.

Clayton and Lokeny knew each other. They were on Buddy Daye Street in Halifax, near the intersection with Gottingen Street, when Clayton struck Lokeny once in the face with a closed fist.

Lokeny fell backwards from the punch and struck his head on the sidewalk. Clayton walked away while bystanders assisted Lokeny.

The victim was taken by ambulance to hospital, where he died just over a month later, on Aug. 28.

The medical examiner determined the cause of death was blunt-force head trauma.

Clayton was arrested March 22, 2019, a few days after the case was added to the province's Rewards for Major Unsolved Crimes Program, and charged with murder.

The guilty plea to the included charge of manslaughter came after a pair of resolution conferences with the judge.

Lawyers were unable to reach a joint sentencing recommendation for Friday's hearing but were not far apart.

Crown attorneys Christine Driscoll and Sarah Kirby asked for a sentence of six years. They said one-punch manslaughters often attract shorter sentences, but this case required a longer period of incarceration because of Clayton's extensive criminal record.

Clayton has 76 other criminal convictions since 1984, including at least six for assault.

Defence lawyer Peter Planetta proposed a sentence of 5.5 years. He said his client's alcohol addiction has fuelled much of his offending, but he has been sober since his arrest and has gained insight into his problems.

Clayton completed anger management and substance abuse programming while on remand and was accepting responsibility for taking Lokeny's life, Planetta said.

Driscoll told the court Lokeny immigrated to Canada from South Sudan and had lived in Halifax since 2001. He was working with a cleaning company and regularly sent some of his earnings to relatives back home in South Sudan.

“I'm not going to make any comments on what was going on between the two men” before the punch was thrown, the prosecutor said. “We don't know, and it's not before the court.

“One blow essentially led to the end of his life,” she said of Lokeny. “He had friends, he had roommates, he worked, and that's a loss.”

The judge said the Crown's six-year recommendation properly reflected Clayton's circumstances.

“The problem is that he has a disease – alcoholism – and the way it impacts on him is that it contributes to violent behaviour,” the judge said.

“Despite many, many court orders put in place to try to address this, and the use of the few tools the courts have in probation and jail, nothing has kept Mr. Clayton from repeating his criminal behaviour. So the issue really is not whether he needs to be segregated from society, but for how long.”

He told Clayton he would have endorsed a sentence of up to seven years, “because I continue to be concerned about your potential to continue the upward trajectory of the use of violence when you're under the influence of alcohol that I saw in your record.”

Fourteen of Clayton's convictions happened after the day he punched Lokeny in the face, Duncan noted.

“I was particularly troubled by your inability or failure to stop the criminal activity, including assaultive behaviours, after Mr. Lokeny died,” he said. “It really struck me as to how out of control you were at that time, that his death couldn't cause you step back and deal with your problem.

“That's very worrisome. … Your past history is that (after) you go to jail, you do go back into your community and you take up your old ways. So what's to say that doesn't happen again this time? It's on you to resolve that.”

Duncan also imposed a lifetime firearms prohibition and ordered Clayton to provide a sample of his DNA for a national databank.