Last fall, Superior Court Justice Michael Code opted for leniency. Christian Collins, a Toronto man with a lengthy criminal record, stood before him having pleaded guilty to cocaine trafficking and possessing a loaded firearm. Instead of locking him up, Code gave Collins a conditional sentence of two years less a day, ordering him to live under house arrest and perform community service.
“I am satisfied that he is completely reformed,” Code wrote in his decision, which took effect on Oct. 24, 2023. In court on Friday, Code ruefully revisited those words, finding that the 29-year-old Collins was most likely involved in a downtown Toronto armed robbery that took place just days after his sentence had started.
In a remarkable hearing on Friday, Code — one of the most senior and respected jurists in Ontario — admitted that he had been convinced Collins had “given up his previous life of crime,” and had believed his testimony that he was a reformed man with a newfound love of fatherhood and his rap career. “I believed you were sincere,” Code told Collins, reading from a 25-page decision ordering him to spend the rest of his conditional sentence behind bars. Two days after Code handed him what a prosecutor called a “chance of a lifetime” — Collins allegedly left a meeting with his probation officer and drove to an Etobicoke Home Depot, where he bought two sets of DeWalt walkie-talkies.
The next afternoon, on Oct. 27, 2023, video surveillance captured two men, .