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Colby Cosh: The judge who excused a sex offender for failing to register

Once again, it seems the courts always have the last word over legislatures

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I was a little torn reading in the Hamilton Spectator about the latest blow to “Christopher’s Law,” the Ontario statute from 2000 that created a provincial sex-offender registry. The law was named for Christopher Stevenson, an 11-year-old boy who was abducted and murdered by a man just released from prison for an earlier sex crime against an 11-year-old. Laws named after individual crime victims are usually lousy ones, but Justice Davin Garg’s ruling has a slightly fantastical quality. Compelled by a recent Supreme Court ruling against lifetime mandatory registration for sex offenders in a parallel federal database, Garg found he had no choice but to strike down the analogous mandatory-registration requirement in the Ontario law.

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