CAEFS believes that mandatory minimum sentences also contribute to systemic discrimination by putting pressure on lawyers to resort to extraordinary measures to avoid conviction and the mandatory sentence for their clients. Many of the problems that have been associated with the defences of self- defence and provocation are in fact distortions caused by the existence of a mandatory minimum sentence of life imprisonment for murder. Accused persons, lawyers, and judges are pressured to resort to constructs such as “Battered Woman Syndrome”, “Homosexual Advance”, “Homosexual Panic”, “Cultural Defences”, and “Rage” in order to avoid this sentence, even when such uses carry negative social policy consequences and in fact violate the Charter rights of the deceased victims and social groups such as women, lesbians and gays, and racialized people. The more appropriate response is to rid the law of the mandatory minimum sentence of life for murder.

CAEFS also opposes the use of the mandatory life sentence for murder based on its contribution to the growing population of prisoners in Canada, and particularly women prisoners. We know that women have not suddenly become more violent, yet the numbers of women serving life sentences have risen from 12-14 % in the late 1980s, to approximately 22 % a decade later. CAEFS attributes this startling increase in the women’s federal population to the impact of mandatory life sentences for murder. A similar trend has been documented in the United States, where the increased use of mandatory minimum sentences has produced its most dramatic expansion of prisoners in the women’s population.

Further, CAEFS notes that the effect of the mandatory minimum sentence for murder in Canada is to produce extraordinarily long sentences of incarceration, by international standards. For example, only just behind the U.S., Canada has the second longest average sentence, 28.4 years, served for first degree murder among many nations, where the average sentence served among these nations is 14.3 years.