Sentencing For Indignity to Human Remains and Tribunal System Fix
Someone dies, and the person beside them makes a choice that shocks everyone: no call for help, no report, just a body hidden away. We unpack a BC Provincial Court sentencing decision under Criminal Code section 182, the offence of offering an indignity to a dead body or human remains, and why the judge calls the conduct inherently serious even though there’s no finding that the accused caused the death. Along the way, we break down aggravating versus mitigating factors, the role of remorse and an early guilty plea, and how Gladue principles shape the court’s understanding of moral blameworthiness.
We also talk about the realities that don’t fit neatly into legal categories: addiction, fear, and the ripple effects on family and community when a person is treated as “missing” for weeks. The sentencing math matters too, including enhanced credit for time served because of brutal protective custody conditions that resemble solitary confinement, and why the court still concludes that a conditional sentence at home would not meet denunciation and deterrence.
Then the conversation swings to administrative justice and the BC Court of Appeal: a Whole Foods probationary firing that turns into years of litigation through the Workers’ Compensation system, judicial review, and parallel Human Rights Tribunal proceedings. We explain security for costs, why courts sometimes require it when an appeal is virtually without merit, and why overlapping tribunals can create expensive duplication. We close with a clear primer on habeas corpus under Charter section 10(c) and a key limit: when the Court of Appeal can, and cannot, appoint counsel. If you care about Canadian law, access to justice, and how courts balance principle with real life, subscribe, share the episode, and leave a review with the question you want us to tackle next.
Legally Speaking with Michael Mulligan is live on CFAX 1070 every Thursday at 12:30 p.m. It’s also available on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Legally Speaking Mar 12, 2026
Adam Stirling [00:00:00] It’s time for our regular segment, Legally Speaking, joined as always by Michael Mulligan, Barrister and Solicitor with Mulligan Defence Lawyers. Afternoon, Michael, how are we doing?
Michael T. Mulligan [00:00:09] Hey, good afternoon. I’m doing great. Always good to be here.
Adam Stirling [00:00:11] Some interesting items on the agenda today, a grim scenario as we start things off. Sentencing it says for a man with no record who hid the body of his deceased partner in a freezer for three months. What happened?
Michael T. Mulligan [00:00:26] Well, he pled guilty, and the offence that he pled guilty to is one that is not common, but looking at the authorities in this case, it does come up from time to time. And the particular offence is contrary to section 182 of the criminal code, and that section makes it an offence to improperly or indecently interfere with or offering an indignity to a dead body or human remains. That’s a crime, And I suppose on one level that sort of makes sense that’s a crime. The judge speaks about how in the past it’s been talked about as Activity which is “very serious and inherently abhorrent” and it relates to, as the judge pointed out, cultural and spiritual significance associated with the handling and treatment of the body of a deceased person. And so it, like in this case, there’s no requirement the person had anything to do with the death or was at least criminally responsible for that, but it’s a serious crime. And so this is a judge struggling with how do you sentence somebody for that. And here, the background of the man that’s indicated in that leader is that he’s 48 years of age, he had no criminal record, he’s Indigenous, he has two children from a previous relationship and he had what can only be described as a horrific background in his life, being sexually and physically abused by his father for years when he was a child, a terrible circumstance growing up and I must say that’s the sort of thing you see with some frequency and Gladue reports for Indigenous people who are being sentenced, just terrible circumstances earlier in their life.
Adam Stirling [00:02:15] Yeah.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:02:15] And so that’s the factual matrix and the event itself, you know, it wasn’t something out of Pulp Fiction, the movie. It was this fellow and this woman who was his partner, they’d been apparently living together for a year and a half despite, and this may explain the action to some extent, the woman who passed away, the partner of this man, was still married to a person described by the judge as a well-known organized crime figure.
Adam Stirling [00:02:47] Oh.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:02:47] And so I think there might have been concern that there could have been physical repercussions as a result of her dying. And like in Pulp Fiction that one of the underlying issues here was drug use both this man and the woman who died were seriously addicted to drugs and they were in bed woke up, and she was dead probably related to the drugs. But instead of phoning the police or somebody or phoning somebody to help. He instead cleaned her body and put it in the garbage bags and in a large freezer. And didn’t say anything and then a month or so went by and the landlord hadn’t seen the woman and became concerned so phoned the police to do a wellness check they showed up, originally, he wouldn’t let them in. Next time they came back after a couple of months he let them in and they snooped around and eventually opened the freezer and asked what’s this garbage bag he said turkeys they kept looking and it wasn’t turkeys. And so he wound up being arrested. He was also detained, that’s the other fact pattern, he was held in custody, and in just really awful circumstances, he was put into protective custody, sort of isolated in prison. I guess out of concern that the associates of the well-known criminal figure would kill him. And so he spent a very long period of time in custody and mounting to sort of solitary or virtually solitary confinement, which had a negative impact on his mental health, having no human contact. And so it’s in that, that matrix, a judge has to decide, well, how do you sentence this? And You know, there are some elements of this offence that are not dissimilar to sometimes you see people charged with failing to remain in the scene of a car accident? Where they had nothing to do, you know, the accident was not their fault, the offence was not staying.
Adam Stirling [00:04:37] Yeah.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:04:37] And just like here, there’s no indication that he caused this person’s death, it’s just that he responded in the way that he did. And it did cause dislocation and angst for a lot of people who thought this woman was just a missing person and, you know, friends and relatives of her were you know, naturally concerned, and horrified to find out what had become of her for that period of time they didn’t know where she was.
Adam Stirling [00:05:01] Yeah.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:05:01] And so, a judge has this sort of list of things that he described as aggravating factors and mitigating factors. And, so, there’s this long list of things he described are aggravating factors. One of the interesting things that was argued about, there is there’s a statutory aggravating fact in the criminal code that judges have to take into account if somebody “abuses an intimate partner.” And so there was legal debate about, well, how does that apply here? She was deceased at the time this happened, but there’s some authority that that can be interpreted to include impact on friends and family and community members, so that was taken into account. One of the things listed was failing to obtain medical care for her, but again, there’s no indication that that was the cause of the death or certainly an element of the offence, but it listed as a judge as an aggravating factor. The judge found things like using garbage bags and putting a person in the freezer was an aggravating factor. Failing, you know the fact that had the impacts or fact that you know He’s concerned about the drugs being found in the house, found that to be aggravating, various mitigating factors. No criminal record, terrible remorse, early guilty plea, guilty of plans and those Gladue factors including just a horrific background growing up. And one of the things ultimately the judge had to sort out is that the Crown asked for a sentence of two years in prison, and the man’s lawyer asked that if he was to be handed a prison sentence, that he be permitted to serve that at home as a conditional sentence, like on house arrest.
Adam Stirling [00:06:34] mm hmm.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:06:35] And in that regard, the judge had to look at sort of other cases to sort out is one of the first things to decide if a judge is imposing a sentence of less than two years. They need to first of all consider would the person be a risk to serve it on house arrest. If they’re not a risk, that’s an available option for the judge. But the judge also has to consider whether that would be sufficient in terms of denunciation and deterrence and so on. And so the judge looked at a variety of other cases, and surprisingly there are a number of them in B.C. One of the ones the judge looked at was from only 2024. It was a circumstance where a man was given a two-year jail sentence. He had a person pass away in bed with him, I think it sounded like a dating relationship but put her under the bed in duct tape and garbage bags after she had died.
Adam Stirling [00:07:26] Wow.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:07:26] More disturbingly in that case, apparently, he had somebody else over to the house he was trying to have sexual relations with on the bed, so maybe bear that in mind if you’re going on a dating site.
Adam Stirling [00:07:36] Awful.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:07:36] Terrible circumstance. So that person got two years less a day, and the judge, despite all those factors which were mitigating, right, the early guilty plea, lack of criminal record, Indigenous man, serious remorse, terrible time in custody, the judge decided that it wouldn’t be enough to give him house arrest. He decided it had to be a real in-prison jail sentence. And he had already served 191 days in jail waiting for sentencing. He pled guilty early on, but various reports were ordered, it’s not uncommon, pre-sentence reports, psychiatric reports and so on. Gladue report, bringing out that history I indicated. And the judge did give increased credit for the time in custody because of just how terrible the conditions were for him that were none of his doing. They had to put him in segregation since his arrest, not because of his behaviourl but in order to protect him his mental health had declined as a result of that and so the judge wound up Reducing somewhat the sentence to 21 months from the 24 months the crown was asking for To take that into account, and gave him credit for the time he’d spent in custody. But the net result of all those calculations is that he was sentenced to an additional 343 days in jail followed by 18 months of probation And so I thought it was just an interesting case to comment on, not only grim facts, obviously, but just food for thought for people to reflect upon in terms of just the tensions involved when you’re trying to come up with, you know, how do we properly deal with something, which I think most people would agree, is pretty abhorrent and inherently serious conduct. But on the other hand, it’s not conduct that caused the underlying death, and so that’s the outcome. And so the man will be spending an almost additional year in custody, and hopefully he’s physically okay. Hopefully, the organized crime figure isn’t doing anything to him. It sounds like this man’s been through a lot. So that’s the latest for the BC Provincial Court in terms of how sentencing works in the case of a person who’s pleads guilty to doing an indignity to a human body. Latest from the BC Provincial Court.
Adam Stirling [00:09:46] Michael Mulligan with Mulligan Defence Lawyers, Legally Speaking, continues right after this.
[00:09:50] COMMERCIAL.
Adam Stirling [00:09:50] We are back on the air here at CFAC 1070 as we continue Legally Speaking. Joined as always by Michael Mulligen, Barrister and Solicitor with Mulligan Defence Lawyers. Up next on the agenda, Michael, it says security for costs ordered for a woman wanting to appeal both a WCB claim and a human rights claim after, it says here, she was fired by Whole Foods after working there for 70 days. An example, it reads, of why consideration should be given to eliminating, perhaps, these sorts of tribunals. How does that all work together?
Michael T. Mulligan [00:10:21] So, the particular decision just released from the B.C. Court of Appeal involves this woman who had been employed for a very short period of time by Whole Foods back in 2018, she started there. She lasted only 70 days and according to the company was fired after failing an evaluation during her probationary period, that’s the background of it. The woman made a number of challenges to that outcome that are still reverberating now in 2026. The particular thing that the Court of Appeal was dealing with was an appeal from the Workers’ Compensation Appeal Tribunal. The way that works is she made a Workers’ Compensation Board claim alleging that she had been fired because she reported a health and safety issue. That’s the allegation she made, which is contrary to the Workers Compensation Act. And that was investigated by an officer there. They found that didn’t have merit. She appealed that then to the Workers’ Compensation Appeal Tribunal. One of these myriad kind of specialized tribunals we have set up all around the province, we have Workers’ Compensation Appeal Tribunal, we have things like the Human Rights Tribunal, these things that sort of investigate or adjudicate claims made under a variety of different pieces of legislation. And so She alleged that she was fired because of this reporting of a health and safety issue that was looked into. The officer there said, no, that’s not why you were fired. You were fired because of your failed evaluation. She then appealed that to the Workers Compensation Appeal Tribunal. She lost, those, like, appeals to the What do you call it, the human rights tribunal, can go on for days and days, and it’s apparent looking at some of the earlier cases here, just how long and how embroidered some of those kinds of hearings and appeals can be, and they are accordingly extremely expensive, If you have some hearing that goes on for a week with multiple applications and so on, it’s going to cost tens of thousands of dollars if you’re somebody who’s on the other end of one of those kind of claims.
Adam Stirling [00:12:31] Yeah.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:12:31] And so she had one of these long claims workers compensation appeal tribunal she lost. She then appealed that to the B.C. Supreme Court by way of the judicial review, unsuccessful. She appealed issues then there to the Court of Appeal, which is how we get to 2026. And so she’s in the Court of Appeal for a variety of things. Whole Foods, one of the things they’re asking for is security for costs. And the idea there is that if you lose, you’re going to be ordered to pay costs, but if the person has no money, good luck collecting it. And Whole Foods was not unreasonably concerned that this woman would not be able to pay if she lost there. And indeed, her response to that was that, well, she could pay overtime if she didn’t succeed, although she doesn’t currently have the money to pay for things that are for various other expenses. And so the Court of Appeal pointed out that, sort of in general terms, they’re slow to order costs, security for costs where somebody doesn’t have any money because maybe the claim can’t proceed. But where the claim is, “virtually without merit”, they may well do so even if it has that effect. One of the things that was pointed out by the Court Of Appeal here, they determined that there was a second appeal in the Court of Appeal dealing with the same fact pattern exactly by the same person, because in addition to the claim which was being litigated with respect to the Workers Compensation Appeal Tribunal, she had also brought a Human Rights Tribunal complaint where she, in that case, alleged that she had been fired for the same job, not because of reporting health and safety violations, but she alleged she was fired because of discrimination based on disability, physical disability, race, sexual orientation also going up to the court. Those of course, when you look at those two things, are on the face of it at least, are rather inconsistent.
Adam Stirling [00:14:24] Yeah.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:14:24] If you’re alleging, I got fired not because I failed my test, but because I reported a health and safety violation by the way, other filing. In fact, I was fired because of discrimination based on those other factors. And again, those human rights tribunal things now can go on for days, and so they can be very expensive pieces of litigation. And so, one of the thoughts I had reading this case and the underlying bits and pieces of it, because it’s going on for so long. And honestly, we’ve talked about other cases on this show from Human Rights Tribunal and other things like that, which can be very lengthy, is that it may make sense to try to rationalize all those things in a way that would be more cost-effective and expedient. And the first thing that came to mind for me was we talked about before the civil resolution tribunal we’ve had set up in British Columbia. That’s intended to resolve small claims like very small claims, like if you’re suing somebody for $5,000 or less. You can go to the Civil Resolution Tribunal, and they’ll adjudicate those disputes in a variety of ways, like online material or written submissions or sometimes by Zoom or on the phone and come up with decisions in a way that is sort of in keeping with the quantum, you know, the value of the claim. You know, there’s no point having a week-long hearing over a thousand-dollar claim. You’re better off just going to work, right? And so it’s sort of a process designed to fit that. Now, the government has expanded the use of that civil resolution tribunal, in my judgement, into things they really ought not to do. Like, for example, when there’s a dispute with ICBC because that’s a government-owned entity and the people there are not independent like judges are. They’re short-term government employees. But for sorting out things like an appeal under the workers’ compensation system, or sorting out a human rights complaint, you know, alleging that you were fired for some purpose of, based on some discriminatory factor, it seems to be that that process would be much more in keeping with sort of what’s at stake in terms of the quantum of potential remedies, And I must say that Tribunal can deal with things that are much more than that in the ICBC context, more than $5,000. And the other advantage of that is it would kind of like, it would avoid things like in this case where you’ve got two completely parallel processes that may be internally inconsistent going on and duplicating hearings into what went on and why was this person fired. If you had one entity like that deal with it rather than having a separate human rights tribunal and a separate group of people on the workers compensation appeal tribunal, and there are a bunch of these all over government. You could likely reduce the cost and produce a lot of efficiency both in the hearing process and duplicating things like we’ve seen in this case. So I thought it was a useful thing to comment on both in terms of the specifics of it and how that security for cost issue works but also just more fundamentally so people know there are all these parallel appeal processes out there and they can go on for a very long period of time and they can be extremely expensive and this is an example of that and that will be a way to remedy it. So that’s latest on the human rights and workers compensation appeal process off to the court of appeal it goes.
Adam Stirling [00:17:55] All right, we’ve got two and a half minutes left out at 59. What next?
Michael T. Mulligan [00:17:59] Yeah, final case briefly is a case involving an application for the appointment of counsel in the Court of Appeal for what’s referred to as a habeas corpus application. Now, you might have heard that term, sometimes you hear it in the U.S. Context with appeals there. Habeas corpus is Latin, it literally translates to produce the body. And it has a long legal history, and in fact, there’s a constitutional right to it, Section 10C for those keeping track at home. That section of the Charter says you have the right to determine the validity of a detention by way of habeas corpus, to determine if the detention is lawful. And the history of that is it sort of explained why you’re holding this person. It’s sort of what would prevent you from being disappeared in the middle of the night. You know produce a body and a court can determine whether you’re lawfully being detained. This case was a man who was a prisoner at Mission Institution, and he was making a habeas corpus application to try to get, try to assist with an application for parole, by the way, I won’t go too far into those weeds. But that’s what he was asking, that’s generally what he’s asking for. But he was wanting a lawyer appointed to help him. And ultimately, the Court of Appeal concluded that they did not have authority to do that because, well, there’s a section of the Criminal Code, 684, that allows for the appointment of counsel to help with criminal appeals. And some habeas corpus applications can be criminal-like and related, where that does occur. Like, for example, there are cases where somebody might say, hey, there is no valid warrant to detain me, or there’s something oddball went on, I shouldn’t be in prison here. That’s genuinely a criminal sort of thing where a lawyer could be appointed. Where you have this kind of habeas corpus application that’s more civil in nature, the court found that it didn’t have any authority to do that because the Court of Appeal is a statutory court and unless you can point to a law that allows them to do that they don’t have authority to appoint a lawyer. And so the upshot is that the man won’t get a lawyer to help with this habeas corpus’ application at least when paid for. And so that’s what habeas corpus is and that’s one of the limitations in terms of when a lawyer can be appointed to help you, they can’t be appointed to help on a civil case. And sometimes, even though the issue is whether you should be in prison, that can be civil and no legal aid or lawyer may be available. That’s the latest from the Court of Appeal.
Adam Stirling [00:20:18] Michael Mulligan with Legally Speaking during the second half of our second hour every Thursday. Michael, thank you so much. Pleasure, as always.
Michael T. Mulligan [00:20:24] Thanks so much, always great to be here.
Adam Stirling [00:20:26] All right, quick break. We’ll be back from the news right after this.
Automatically Transcribed on March 17, 2026 – MULLIGAN DEFENCE LAWYERS