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On Monday's live stream, Sheila Gunn Reid and David Menzies discussed how race is increasingly being considered by judges during sentencings for criminal convictions in Canada.

A recent report from the National Post outlined how a Toronto judge explicitly took into account a perpetrator's experience with "anti-black racism" and an "absence of black role models" while giving him lenient sentencing.

The man was ultimately sentenced to approximately four and a half years in prison last month after being convicted of drug trafficking and possession of a loaded handgun last summer.

Sheila condemned Canada's justice system for imposing race-based sentencing instead of equal justice under the law.

"This is mental ... this is just part of a systemic system where the victims are actually the oppressed in all of this because everybody gets to go before a judge and cry poor little criminal, 'I've been so oppressed, and what's happened before me is not a series of bad life choices that I've made to basically lay waste to my community and my own personal potential, somebody did this to me, and maybe they didn't even do it to me, they did it to my ancestors that I never met,'" she said.

This decision follows a growing pattern in Canadian courts where Impact of Race and Culture Assessments are used to inform sentencing outcomes. Ontario Superior Court rulings have increasingly treated documented experiences of racism as relevant mitigating circumstances.

In this case, the judge accepted that systemic disadvantages and community normalization of crime played a significant role in reducing the offender’s blameworthiness.