N.B. man who fatally stabbed fellow inmate Calvin Kenny gets 22-year sentence
CBC
A New Brunswick man who killed a fellow inmate while serving a murder sentence expressed remorse to his victim's family, but said he did it to protect himself.
"Nobody knows what goes on in there but the guys in there," Brandon Blake Colford, 27, said during his sentencing hearing Wednesday in Miramichi, in eastern New Brunswick.
"I had to do what I had to do for my own safety, and for that I'm sorry I guess, but it is what it is."
Colford, originally charged with second-degree murder, pleaded guilty in September to the lesser charge of manslaughter in the Feb. 18, 2019, stabbing death of Calvin Clifford Kenny.
Colford and Kenny, a 27-year-old from Fermeuse, N.L., were inmates at the Atlantic Institution in Renous. The maximum security prison is about 30 kilometres southwest of Miramichi.
Colford admits using a 20-centimetre shank, a weapon made in the prison, to stab Kenny more than 40 times.
Court of King's Bench Justice Darrell Stephenson sentenced Colford to 22 years in prison, saying his actions have no place in society and must be denounced.
The sentence was a joint recommendation from Colford's defence lawyer and the Crown prosecutor. It is near the high end of potential manslaughter sentences.
Colford pleaded guilty to manslaughter shortly before his jury trial on a second-degree murder charge was set to start.
Both lawyers declined to comment after the judge issued the decision Wednesday afternoon.
Kenny was serving a sentence of 12½ years in Renous. He was one of four men charged in the death of Steven Miller in Conception Bay South, N.L., in 2016.
Colford, from Blackville, was serving a life sentence with no chance of parole for 15 years when he killed Kenny. Colford had pleaded guilty to stabbing 49-year-old Michael Mark Ryan more than 50 times in Miramichi on April 23, 2016.
According to an agreed statement of facts given to Stephenson, Colford and Kenny were in the same unit at the prison with other inmates from Newfoundland, who considered Kenny their leader.
The statement says Colford claimed Kenny "and his gang threatened to harm him because they alleged he had snitched concerning an incident that had occurred in the kitchen the day prior to the homicide."
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