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The Crown is seeking a 10-year prison sentence for a Windsor man whose illegal gun trafficking transaction turned deadly inside a vehicle on the city’s east side on Dec. 29, 2021.
Lawrence Davis, 26, was initially charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of Patric Vicente-Sandy, 23, on a Forest Glade street. Arrested the day after the fatal encounter, he was also charged with attempted murder in relation to a third vehicle occupant.
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Davis faced a long list of other criminal charges, but most of those, including the two most serious, were dropped following an Ontario Court of Justice preliminary hearing.
Davis subsequently pleaded guilty to counts of trafficking firearms; possession of a loaded restricted or prohibited firearm; possession of a firearm while prohibited; and failure to comply with a release order.
The defence argued that Davis was the victim of a robbery attempt, and shouldn’t face a penalty much beyond time already served. He’s remained in custody since his Dec. 30, 2021, arrest.
“There is so much hope for this young man,” Davis’s lawyer Patricia Brown told an Ontario Court of Justice sentencing hearing Friday.
Davis had illegal firearms for sale that day. From the vehicle’s back seat, and armed with a loaded handgun, he passed a shoebox containing three guns to the two men in the front seat.
Vicente-Sandy turned around and fired a shot at Davis, Brown told the court. A bullet passed through Davis’s shoulder, and Davis shot back, she said.
Davis was unaware that the vehicle’s child locks were activated, making it impossible to open the rear doors from the inside, Brown said.
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“My client escapes the front door of the driver’s side — he was shot and injured,” she said. “He could have been executed in the back of that car.”
Vicente-Sandy, a Toronto man, was transported to hospital where he was pronounced deceased.
While no longer facing an automatic life sentence for murder, the prosecution nevertheless wants the judge to impose a stiff penalty.
“The principles of denunciation and deterrence take a paramount position in the court’s sentence,” assistant Crown attorney Iain Skelton said during Friday’s hearing before Justice Scott Pratt.
The Crown’s submission came to an abrupt halt at the end of the day on Friday. A date had yet to be set for the prosecution to complete its interrupted submission.
But Davis’s sentence “cannot be crushing,” the defence argued earlier.
“Going to the penitentiary for eight more years is not going to help this young man get his life back on track,” Brown said. “It’s not going to help him pursue a life without criminality.”
Brown said her client was in the backseat of that vehicle — with Vicente-Sandy in the driver’s seat — to sell guns “to make money,” while the other parties involved had something else in mind.
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“It’s the defence’s position that this was a robbery,” Brown said.
As of Aug. 2, Davis had spent 523 of his 803 days in custody at the South West Detention Centre in an overcrowded cell where one man, sometimes Davis, slept on a mattress on the floor. The court heard many of his days at the Windsor jail were in lockdown conditions, where inmates are confined to their cells for additional periods of time due to incidents, staff shortages, or medical emergencies.
The Crown’s Skelton is seeking a penitentiary term of 10 years minus time served, while Brown is seeking a sentence of between three and five years, which — with standard credit the courts give for time in pre-sentence custody — equates to time served, or some more jail time, but not prison.
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The court heard Davis suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from a violent attack in Windsor he survived nearly a decade ago, an incident that “changed his life,” Brown said.
On Halloween night 2015, when Davis was 17, a group beat him to the ground, then got into their vehicle and purposely ran him down. He suffered a fractured pelvis and brain injury, and spent nearly a week in hospital and a month in a wheelchair as a result.
“His aspiration to play football was taken away from him,” Brown said.
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