Update: Deloitte reached out to VICE over the weekend to say it only found out about Macdonald's conviction last week. The company says Macdonald is no longer a Deloitte employee.
The judge sentencing a Queen's University student and hockey player who assaulted a teenage girl at a house party delayed the man's sentence so that it wouldn't interfere with his summer internship.
Chance Macdonald, 22, pleaded guilty to common assault in April after he was initially charged with sexual assault and forcible confinement following a 2015 party. Crown attorney Gerard Laarhuis said Macdonald's victim accepted the lesser plea in part because she didn't want to face a trial and the possibility of being disbelieved in court.
According to the
Kingston Whig-Standard, Macdonald, then a player on Gananoque Islanders Junior C hockey team, wasn't sentenced until last week because his lawyer argued a criminal record would ruin his four-month internship, which he needed to continue on as a Queen's business student. Despite the Crown's protests that the victim deserved closure, Justice Allan Letourneau sided with the defence and waited until last week to hand down Macdonald's sentence of 88 days of intermittent jail on weekends and two years of probation.
Comments made by the judge throughout the proceedings and reported by the
Whig-Standard suggest that he felt a large degree of empathy for Macdonald. Like Macdonald, Justice Letourneau
graduated from Queen's and played hockey.
He said the plea deal was "the right way to go in all respects." He praised Macdonald on his excellence "in employment, in athletics, and in academics." He noted, "I played extremely high-end hockey and I know the mob mentality that can exist in that atmosphere." He told Macdonald he had significant confidence that "you will almost certainly never put yourself in this situation again," describing the assault as a "fork in the road."
On the flip side, most of Justice Letourneau's warnings to Macdonald seemed to focus on how the business student may have ruined his future prospects.
"It all could have come crashing down on you," he noted. Regarding the lesser assault plea, he said, "Good luck finding any meaningful employment with a sexual conviction on your record."
...
"Somebody with a different background who the judge didn't relate to, I can't imagine that kind of leniency or consideration," she said, noting it's unlikely that a young man of colour who didn't play sports would have been treated the same.
Letourneau's comments praising Macdonald's athletic and academic prowess, and warnings about his future employment opportunities "really serve to intentionally or unintentionally minimize the seriousness of what actually took place," said MacQuarrie, who noted that the party's "initiation" tradition of getting rookies laid is a recipe for sexual violence.
...
"He's saying 'you wouldn't want to ruin your opportunities to have an affluent comfortable life.' He's not saying anything about 'you want to be a decent, upstanding, ethical citizen.'"
There was a "complete erasure of the victim," in Letourneau's sentencing, MacQuarrie said, because the focus was all on removing personal responsibility from Macdonald—e.g. the "mob mentality" justification—and consequences to his career.
...
MacQuarrie said the problem isn't that the judge considered impacts to Macdonald's future. The problem is he didn't send any messages about the seriousness of his crime and the impact on the victim. He didn't encourage him to be accountable for his actions, nor did he stress the importance of bystander intervention in situations like a house party.
"What the judge needed to be saying is how serious a violation of someone else's rights and body and spirit this was," she said. Instead, "the judge sent these messages: that you don't have a lot of personal responsibility for this. You've got yourself into a bit of a mess but we're gonna clean it up."
