Judge rejects sentencing recommendation for woman who sold three pills

She and her husband had been evicted from their apartment for smoking, then lived in a camper, and then Roxanne Gordon was living in a tent in someone’s backyard when she found a bottle of hydromorphone while dumpster diving.

According to court documents, she decided to sell three of the pills to a woman she and her husband had met at the Salvation Army’s free supper in Swift Current. The woman had been saying she was in pain, and was often asking people for drugs.

But the woman took the hydromorphone after using an anticonvulsant and was soon unable to walk and felt pins and needles in her legs. The woman was taken to hospital and ended up recovering, but the police were called and they arrested Gordon the next day.

Gordon was charged in July 2018 and pleaded guilty in September. The Crown and defence lawyers presented a joint submission to Judge Karl Bazin of 16 months in jail, which Gordon had agreed to. They noted it was two months less than the usual range for a trafficking offence, which is between 18 months and four years in jail.

However, in Bazin’s written decision, he said that during the sentencing hearing he asked Gordon whether she had Indigenous heritage and she said yes. It was something neither of the lawyers had asked and so they hadn’t asked for a Gladue report before coming to their sentencing submission.

Bazin said that Gordon does not “present physically” as Indigenous.

The judge ordered a Gladue report, and it came back with information about Gordon’s low cognitive functioning, her dysfunctional family, the abuse she suffered during childhood, her time as a teenage prostitute, and her struggles with alcohol and drugs.

The two lawyers continued to argue for the 16-month sentence, but Bazin said if he were to accept a submission into which Gladue factors weren’t considered, it would make it look like “the proper functioning of the justice system had broken down.”

In his decision, a concern was also identified as to Gordon’s methadone treatment. She’d been on a program since about 2005 and there were concerns raised that if she were to be sentenced to jail and then serve her sentence at Pine Grove Correctional, that she could be forcibly removed from the program — something which a doctor said would cause her to suffer severe withdrawal.

Bazin ended up coming to the conclusion that 18 months probation would be appropriate. However, being that Gordon had very strict conditions when she was on remand — including 24-hour house arrest — and that she was on remand for so long, Bazin gave her 12 months credit on the probation.

That means, as of her sentencing in August, she had six more months of probation left to serve.

Among other cases, Bazin pointed to one from 2014 in his decision, where a chief of a First Nation was found guilty of helping his wife sell half a pill of morphine, and was only given a six-month conditional sentence.

He settled on “a penalty much lighter than the 16 months in jail counsel have jointly proposed in this case.”

Bazin said in the written decision that was released in December that, taking into account all the facts, a jail term for Gordon was not required.