The Supreme Court of Canada has upheld a mandatory four-year sentence for an Alberta police officer found guilty in the fatal shooting of a suspect.

The important test case of mandatory minimum sentences involved an Alberta RCMP officer, Constable Michael Esty Ferguson, who inadvertently killed a drunken, unruly prisoner during a station house scuffle on Oct. 3, 1999.

Constable Ferguson maintained that he shot the 26-year-old victim, Darren Varley, twice in self-defence. While the jury rejected the self-defence argument at his 2004 trial, it also declined to find him guilty of murder. Instead, it found him guilty of manslaughter with a firearm.

In a unanimous ruling today, the Court said that the mandatory sentence was not so “grossly disproportionate” as to justify departing from a law specifically drafted by Parliament to prevent judges using their own view of a case to impose a lower sentence.

The Court said that judges cannot create what is known as a “constitutional exemption” to short circuit mandatory sentences which they happen to feel are unconstitutionally cruel.

Going further, the Court sounded the death knell for the very notion of constitutional exemptions - seen by their proponents as a vital escape valve for judges in an era when politicians flock to mandatory minimums because they play well with a vocal segment of the public that believes judges are soft on crime.

The Supreme Court turned its back on those arguments today.

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