Crown won’t appeal Indian national’s lenient sentence in child prostitution sting

Ontario Crown prosecutors won’t appeal a judge’s decision to grant a conditional discharge, sparing jail time for an Indian foreign national who tried to buy sex from an undercover officer.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Ontario Crown prosecutors won’t appeal a judge’s decision to grant a conditional discharge, sparing jail time for an Indian foreign national who tried to buy sex from an undercover officer he thought was a teenage girl.

According to National Post columnist Jamie Sarkonak, prosecutors with the Ontario Attorney General said they have no intention to appeal the decision to a higher court.

“I reached out directly just asking if they would be appealing the case,” the Sarkonak shared with True North.

“It’s from the (Ontario) Ministry of the Attorney General,” Sarkonak continued, when discussing how she learned there would be no appeal to Khant’s conditional discharge.

Akashkumar Narendrakumar Khant’s troubles began when he tried to buy sex from an undercover Ontario police officer posing as a 15-year-old girl. However, rather than face jail time, which is typical in these instances—even in notoriously lenient Canada—Khant was offered a conditional discharge.

Ontario Court Justice Paul O’Marra offered Khant the conditional discharge in part, he said, to mitigate potential “collateral consequences”—including the potential deportation of Khant and his wife.

O’Marra’s decision to let Khant off easy has drawn the ire of many observers who note the Canadian criminal justice system is, at best, rife with double standards and, at worst, entirely nonsensical.

The decision in Khant’s case does, after all, stand in stark contrast to decisions in cases with remarkably similar circumstances.

Take the case of R v. Faroughi, for example.

In 2023, a trial judge determined that the fit sentence for Arian Faroughi—a 19-year-old Ontario man who, like Khant, also tried to solicit sex from what he thought was an underage girl—was sentenced to seven months’ imprisonment on two counts of child luring.

Notably, the Court of Appeal found that the trial judge “failed to properly consider the principle of restraint, particularly the availability of a conditional sentence.”

In particular, the courts noted Faroughi’s relative “youthfulness”—he was only 19 at the time of the offence and had no previous criminal record. Like Khant, he was also an engineering student.

The appeals court held that a conditional sentence for Faroughi “could still meet the goals of denunciation and deterrence, especially for a youthful first-time offender with strong rehabilitative prospects.”

In his written submission to the courts regarding Khant, Justice O’Marra even referenced R v. Faroughi when arriving at his decision on Khant.

But Khant was not 19 at the time of his offence. He was in his early 30s and married. Instead, the decision to spare Khant jail time hinged almost entirely on potential “collateral consequences” to his family’s immigration status.

In a letter written to his MPP, Steven Paolasini, the founder of a Calgary immigration firm, lambasted O’Marra’s ruling and its potential repercussions on Canadian criminal justice and immigration more broadly.

As “a professional working in the field of immigration in Canada,” Paolasini wrote, “it is with deep frustration and concern that I address the recent decision by Justice Paul Thomas O’Marr in R. v. Khant, where a conditional discharge was granted to the defendant, Akashkumar Khant, despite his guilty plea to attempting to commit an indecent act by trying to purchase sexual services from what he believed was a 15-year-old minor.”

“As someone immersed in immigration processes,” Paolasini continued, “I question why family separation was even a mitigating factor here. Khant attempted to cheat on his wife with a minor, an act that is not only morally disgusting but also undermines the very family unit the court sought to protect.”