A Kelowna, B.C, man who killed his wife and children in 2017 has had his sentence lessened thanks to a Supreme Court of Canada decision, although it remains unlikely he will ever leave prison.
Jacob Forman pleaded guilty and was sentenced in 2019 for three counts of murder in relation to the deaths of his wife and two children, aged seven and eight.
Forman killed his wife with a hammer on Dec. 17, 2017, after the couple got into an argument. He strangled his two daughters to death the following night, telling police it was better for them “to go home to heaven than to grow up in a world where their daddy killed their mommy.”
He was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 35 years, the longest sentence ever handed out in B.C. at the time. Federal legislation introduced in 2011 allowed judges to issue consecutive murder sentences.
But in 2022, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that stacking consecutive murder sentences and periods of parole ineligibility is unconstitutional and amounts to “cruel and unusual treatment or punishment." The court was ruling on the case of Quebec mosque shooter Alexandre Bissonnette, who gunned down six people in a racist attack in 2017.
According to a BC Court of Appeal decision published last week, B.C.’s highest court ordered in June that Forman’s parole ineligibility period should be reduced from 35 years to 25.
“In light of the Supreme Court’s decision in Bissonnette, the respondent Crown concedes that the… order made by the sentencing judge in this case is invalid,” the appeals court decision reads.
Forman will now be eligible for parole when he is 60 years old, but it is very unlikely that he will ever be granted it.
Those convicted of multiple murders in Canada “very rarely, if ever” get parole, said the defense lawyer in the case of the Penticton mass shooter who killed four people in 2019. John Brittain was sentenced to life in prison with no parole for 25 years in that case, with the sentencing judge rejecting a proposed 40-year parole ineligibility as “unduly long and harsh.”
