In late march, a 29-year-old Ontario man was sentenced to 10 years in prison after a judge found him responsible for a drunk driving crash that killed three children and their grandfather.
The guilty man, Marco Muzzo had faced a possible life in prison sentence after pleading guilty to four counts of impaired driving causing death, and two counts of impaired driving causing bodily harm.
Impaired driving is dangerous, and often causes harm to innocent victims as a result of someone else’s carelessness. The consequences are steep, but strangely enough, many punishments have been reduced.
Here are three other impaired driving sentences in Canada that have been handed down
Life In Prison
Roger Walsh ran into Anee Khudaverdian after a night of heavy drinking in 2008. Khudaverdian used a wheelchair and was walking her dog on her 47th birthday when Walsh collided into her then continued driving for 10 kilometers before landing in a ditch. The incident was Walsh’s 19th impaired driving conviction, landing him life in prison. Crown prosecutors hoped for a the Quebec judge to also give Walsh a dangerous offender status, but she withheld doing so.
Twenty Years
Following a 2008 impaired driving crash that killed a young mother and her three little girls, an Alberta judge declared Raymond Yellowknee a long-term offender and sentenced him to 20 years and 6 months in prison. The judge also stated that drunk driving causing death was a “serious personal injury offense,” which then made it so that anyone convicted of the offense could not apply to serve their sentence in the community, under house arrest. The crash involving Yellowknee and the four young victims happened on the same day he was released from jail for uttering threats.
Ten Years
After killing a mother of two in a drunk driving crash in April 2013, New Brunswick resident, Boyd Reginald Atkinson was sentenced to 10 years in prison, and banned from driving for life. The accident happened after Atkinson crossed more than two lanes of traffic, leading him to hit the victim’s vehicle head-on. Atkinson, who had four previous alcohol-related offenses, pleaded guilty to impaired driving causing death and impaired driving causing bodily harm.
