Could the killings of Arnold & Joanne De Jong in Abbotsford help bring back ‘faint hope’ for first-degree murderers?
Lawyer for one of three international students who planned the horrific home-invasion homicides to argue 25-year-parole eligibility period unconstitutional
June 13, 2026
Is sentencing everyone who commits first-degree murder to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years cruel and unusual punishment?
That’s the argument Vancouver lawyer Donna Turko successfully made in B.C. Supreme Court three years ago when her client Luciano Mariani pleaded guilty to first-degree murder for bludgeoning his former girlfriend Caroline Bernard to death with a baseball bat while she slept in August 2021.
Now, Turko is apparently planning to make a similar argument in her defence of Kushveer Singh Toor, one of three Indian international students convicted of the violent first-degree murder of Arnold and Joanne De Jong during a home invasion in Abbotsford in 2022.
Toor along with Abhijeet Singh and Gurkaran Singh was convicted of the killings on May 8, 2026 in B.C. Supreme Court in Abbotsford.
The three planned and carried out a home invasion and robbery in which the septuagenarians were violently attacked, tortured, and murdered to eliminate them as witnesses to the robbery.
“Their deaths were intimate and prolonged,” Justice Brenda Brown said in rendering her decision. Intimate in that the perpetrators were in close contact with the De Jongs. Neither of the deaths were quick.”
Principle of proportionality
Toor’s lawyer Donna Turko was defence counsel for Mariani who pleaded guilty to killing his girlfriend Caroline Bernard in 2021.
The killing was planned for months for revenge for Bernard having an abortion early on in their relationship. Mariani beat her to death in her bed and left the horrific scene for Bernard’s young daughter to find.
He pleaded guilty to first-degree murder. The sentence for first-degree murder is life in prison with no chance of applying for parole for 25 years. Turko argued that was cruel and unusual punishment because the law doesn’t distinguish between different murders, for example, whether a killer is a gang hitman or a “little old lady.”
The sentence is one of the most clear cut in the Criminal Code as it applies to offenders who plan and kill one person as equally as it applies to a person who walks into a school and kills 10 children.
In deciding in her favour in a January 2025 ruling, Justice David Crossin said that makes the the broad-brush sentence unconstitutional, because the “principle of proportionality demands that offenders that have victimized one person receive a different sentence.”
Is ‘faint hope’ coming back?
Section 745.6 of the Criminal Code was known as the “faint hope clause,” a provision that allowed prisoners sentenced for murder or high treason to life with parole eligibility of more than 15 years to apply for early parole once they served 15 years.
It was enacted in 1976 when the death penalty was abolished. The clause was meant to provide offenders with an incentive to rehabilitate while also lowering the risk to corrections officers who were often left to manage the predictable danger from inmates with zero hope of ever being released.
The process under the criminal code provision was rigorous. An inmate needed to convince a judge, then a jury, then the Parole Board of Canada that they had sufficiently changed behind bars to warrant release.
Want to support independent journalism?
Consider a one-time donation or subscribe for less than $1 a week so I can continue this work.
Along came Stephen Harper’s Conservative government with it’s supposed “tough-on-crime” policies. While most of his mandatory minimums were deemed to violate section 7 of the Charter already, one stood the test of time. Harper abolished the faint-hope clause in 2011 to protect victims from trauma and, the Conservative government argued, to help provide “truth in sentencing.”
As with most populist policies, the problem in practical terms is that it didn’t work. Or more importantly, the “faint-hope clause” did work. From 1987 to 2023, there were 267 court decisions on the clause, 73.4 per cent of which resulted in a reduction of the time before parole eligibility. Of those 196 cases, according to the Canadian Criminal Justice Association (CCJA) in a recent position paper, 192 had reached their day parole eligibility date. Of these, 180 were released on parole because of the “faint-hope clause.” Of the 180, there were 116 being supervised in the community, 48 were dead, six were in custody, six were deported, and four were temporarily detained.
By 2010, right before the Harper government killed the law, the Parole Board had revoked parole out of all of those people in just 11 cases, nine of which were non-violent offences such as impaired driving or fraud.
“There were only two revocations for a violent offence, one for an offence of robbery and the other for assault with a weapon,” according to the paper.
“These statistics clearly show that the ‘faint hope clause,’ as it was applied did not pose an undue threat to the safety of our communities.”
Even mass murderers are eligible for parole after 25 years
Justice Crossin’s ruling on the constitutionality of life with no parole for 25 years referenced the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in the case of Quebec mosque shooter Alexandre Bissonnette who killed six people.
Bissonnette was sentenced to life in prison and the “trial judge stacked multiple parole ineligibility periods, resulting in a total parole ineligibility period of 40 years,” the ruling says.
The Supreme Court of Canada found that the part of the code that allowed “offenders convicted of multiple murders to serve parole ineligibility periods for each murder consecutively, was unconstitutional.”
“The result of Bissonnette is that individuals convicted of multiple murders will be sentenced to life without the possibility of parole for 25 years, without an ability to apply for a reduction of their parole ineligibility,” the ruling says. “This presents a stark reality in the sentencing regime for first-degree murder.”
So, goes Turko’s argument in her case with Mariani, if the highest period of parole ineligibility for serial or mass killers is now firmly set at 25 years, that same number is cruel and unusual punishment for those convicted of just one first-degree murder.
In a story in Canadian Press from 2025, Turko said the court ruling is a “complicated decision,” but could potentially revive the “faint hope” regime that allowed convicted murderers to apply for parole early.
A year ago, Turko said similar challenges in other provinces came to different results, which means that case would likely be taken to the B.C. Court of Appeal, and then to the Supreme Court of Canada.
While no one is sympathizing with people convicted of first-degree murder, the practical and legal reality is that the law as it is written currently fails to distinguish between someone with mental health problems or a hate-crime mass murderer, such as Bissonette.
What remains to be seen is how she can make this argument in the case Singh, Singh, and Toor since not only did they plan and carry out the murders, they were not a single murder.
And only coincidentally, both the murders in Nanaimo and Abbotsford involved using a baseball bat as a weapon.
Lost also in all of this is the practical reality that parole eligibility does not mean parole will be granted. In fact, according to Vancouver lawyer Kyla Lee, almost no one convicted of first-degree murder is ever granted parole anyway.
Turko did not respond to a request on Tuesday (June 9) to discuss the case before this story was published on Saturday.
-30-
Want to support independent journalism?
Consider becoming a paid subscriber or make a one-time donation so I can continue this work.
Paul J. Henderson
pauljhenderson@gmail.com
facebook.com/PaulJHendersonJournalist
instagram.com/wordsarehard_pjh
x.com/PeeJayAitch
wordsarehard-pjh.bsky.social