Murderer has changed ways, faint-hope hearing told
When convicted killer Robbie Soomel lost his brother in a 2009 gangland hit, it had a profound impact on his life inside a federal prison, his lawyer said Wednesday.
Brent Anderson told a B.C. Supreme Court judge that the fatal shooting of Raj Soomel in a case of mistaken identity “was the catalyst for Mr. Soomel to change his ways.”
“It has perhaps provided him with a unique perspective on the harm he caused through his offending because he now is himself a victim of a family member having been murdered,” Anderson told Justice George Macintosh.
Anderson asked Macintosh to send Robbie Soomel’s case to a faint-hope hearing, where a jury would decide if he should get parole before serving 25 years of his life sentence.
Soomel was convicted of the first-degree murder of friend-turned-drug trade rival Gurpreet Sohi, shot to death in a Delta basement suite in September 2000. And Soomel pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder for assisting with the 1997 contracted killing of Jason Herle in Abbotsford. Soomel was just 18 at the time.
At his murder trial, he was also identified as a suspect in the still-unsolved 1998 assassination of journalist Tara Singh Hayer, who had agreed to testify for the Crown in the Air India terrorism case.
Anderson said that despite Soomel’s violent history and the disciplinary problems that plagued his early years of incarceration, he has been a model prisoner since 2010, taking courses, qualifying for escorted trips into the community and being “very active” in William Head Institution’s theatre productions.
“He has really demonstrated that change where he is now a fundamentally different person,” Anderson said.
He argued that the purpose of a faint-hope hearing is “to determine what has been the change in the applicant’s circumstance that might justify imposing a lesser penalty.”
Soomel, now 39, meets the criteria for a hearing, Anderson said.
MacIntosh noted that his role in deciding whether to send Soomel’s case forward “is to guess what that jury is going to do.” A jury in a fainthope case must rule unanimously to reduce a killer’s parole ineligibility period.
Crown Dan Mulligan said Soomel does not meet the criteria because of the nature of his offences, as well as his conduct inside federal prisons where he amassed dozens of institutional charges and convictions.
“It says something about Mr. Soomel’s character that he was involved in two homicides, both of which were fairly intricately planned,” Mulligan said. “There are very few indications in the Corrections documents that Mr. Soomel has expressed heartfelt or genuine remorse for the murders.”
He said Soomel tends to minimize his role in his violent crimes, suggesting he was influenced by others in the gang and drug world in which he was immersed as a youth.
In fact, Soomel ran his own drug business and had five or six employees at the time he targeted Sohi.
The hearing is expected to end Thursday, with Macintosh reserving his decision.