International students who murdered Abbotsford couple in cold blood say 25 years before parole eligibility is cruel and unusual punishment
Parliament eliminated ‘faint hope’ clause in 2011, but it may be back thanks to Supreme Court of Canada decision on Bissonnette mosque mass murder
September 6, 2026
If you are convicted of planning and carrying out a murder of someone in Canada, you are automatically sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years.
Mostly.
There was the so-called “faint-hope clause,” which Parliament killed 15 years ago. What many people might not realize is that faint hope is back again, sort of. Like most aspects of our criminal justice system and the law, there are some nuances that make it hard to reduce to a headline, a short broadcast TV clip.
The family of a murdered Abbotsford couple were in B.C. Supreme Court in Abbotsford last week enduring yet more court hearings for the three international students who violently killed Arnold and Joanne De Jong on in their home in 2022 then crudely tried to pilfer their money.
Vancouver lawyer Donna Turko who represents one of the men, Kushveer Singh Toor, made a somewhat novel argument in court in applying for a faint-hope murder sentence, which means giving him a chance to apply for parole after 15 years in prison. This is what is was covered by section 745.6 of the criminal code, and in no way means the person given that sentence would get parole after 15 years. Just the hope.
In 2011, Stephen Harper’s tough-on-crime Conservative government enacted legislation with a name that sounds a little like a children’s book: the Serious Time for the Most Serious Crime Act, which killed faint hope under section 745.6.
Parliament had already excluded multiple murderers from faint hope in the 1990s. The 2011 legislation abolished faint hope for everybody else convicted of first-degree murder starting in 2012.
So why are we talking about faint hope in 2026? Not coincidentally, because of a 2025 legal decision prompted by a successful argument made by the same lawyer who was in Abbotsford court last week: Donna Turko.
Luciano Mariani resented the fact that his ex-girlfriend Caroline Bernard had an abortion. He planned her murder well in advance and on August 31, 2021, broke into her home in Bowser, B.C. and beat her to death with a baseball bat while she slept.
Mariani was convicted of first-degree murder. His lawyer, the aforementioned Donna Turko, launched a constitutional challenge under section 12 of the Charter, which covers cruel and unusual punishment. Turko pointed to the case of Alexandre Bissonnette who murdered six men in the mosque in Quebec in 2017. Bissonnette was sentenced to consecutive life sentences with no chance of parole for 40 years. That sentence was overturned by the Supreme Court of Canada, which ruled it was a violation of, you guessed it, section 12 of the Charter.
Turko’s successful argument was that it isn’t fair that a man who intentionally kills one person gets the same sentence as someone who kills six people.
B.C. Supreme Court Justice David Crossin agreed in January 2025, that because of the principle of proportionality, it is unconstitutional to treat all offenders convicted of first-degree murder with the same punishment.
Ironically and unfortunately for Mariani, Crossin’s decision ruled that the while elimination of faint hope broadly for murderers of one victim violated the Charter because of Bissonnette, there was nothing disproportionate about the mandatory penalty of no parole for 25 years for Mariani’s case because the circumstances were particularly horrific.
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Justice Crossing didn’t rule that Mariani deserves parole after 15 years. It was more along the lines of, Mariani should have the opportunity after 15 years to demonstrate that 25 years of parole ineligibility is no longer warranted.
So, faint hope is back? Not quite. The Law Society of B.C.'s current criminal procedure materials do put it explicitly: “offenders sentenced after 2011 who are otherwise eligible (e.g. did not commit multiple murders) retain the right to apply for a reduction in parole eligibility after 15 years of imprisonment and must be advised of that right at the time of sentencing.”
That may be what the Law Society of B.C. says today, but Crown is actively trying to overturn Mariani, and it has become procedurally unusual enough that there are proceedings involving both the B.C. Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada.
Faint hope is essentially in limbo, for now, it’s status unresolved.
Back to the De Jong murders and the convictions of Toor and his co-conspirators Abhijeet Singh and Gurkaran Singh. Turko dusted off her Mariani case to argue that a sentence of life with no chance of parole for 25 years amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.
Turko’s likely insurmountable legal problem, as pointed out by Justice Brenda Brown, is that Toor didn’t murder just one person. He was involved in a conspiracy to murder two.
Right there in parentheses in the Law Society of B.C.’s own criminal procedure directives is the caveat that faint hope is not eligible to offenders who commit multiple murders.
Justice Brown suggested to Turko that the lawyer’s argument for faint-hope eligibility for Toor opened the door for faint hope for mass killers. If faint hope is advanced to multiple murderers who kill two people, why not three? Four? Five?
The hearing last week went three days Monday to Wednesday (Sept. 2, 2026). The case was put over to Oct. 19 for sentencing
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Paul J. Henderson
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