The Supreme Court of Canada ruled the gunman who killed six people in a Quebec City mosque cannot wait more than 25 years before being eligible for parole..Crown prosecutors had asked the Supreme Court to implement a 50-year wait for parole eligibility for Alexandre Bissonnette. Friday's decision was unanimous, with all nine judges dismissing the Crown's appeal.."Not only do such punishments bring the administration of justice into disrepute, but they are cruel and unusual by nature," they said..Bissonnette pleaded guilty to six counts of first-degree murder and six counts of attempted murder for his attack on worshippers at the Islamic Cultural Centre on January 29, 2017..The Crown asked the Quebec Superior Court judge to impose a parole ineligibility period of 150 years, which would have been 25 consecutive years for each of the six people he murdered..A sentencing provision introduced by Stephen Harper's Conservative government in 2011 gives judges discretionary powers to hand out consecutive, 25-year blocks of parole ineligibility periods for multiple first-degree murders..In Bissonnette's case, it would have been the harshest Canadian sentence handed down since the death penalty was abolished..The judge gave Bissonnette a life sentence with no chance of parole before 40 years. But that decision was overturned by the Quebec Court of Appeal in 2020, that decided to set Bissonnette's wait for a chance at parole to 25 years. The Supreme Court agreed with the Court of Appeal's ruling..The judges ruled the consecutive sentencing periods provision is "intrinsically incompatible with human dignity because of their degrading nature."."They deny offenders any moral autonomy by depriving them, in advance and definitively, of any possibility of reintegration into society," the ruling read.
