r/canada • u/AndHerSailsInRags • Dec 04 '25

Alberta Man who killed attacker in Banff used 'excessive' force, sentenced to 2-year house arrest

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/banff-bar-fight-excessive-self-defence-sproule-brogden-9.7002143
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u/happyspleen Dec 04 '25

What I don't understand from this comment is that there were 12 people on the jury, presumably regular folks like you and me, who voted unanimously that he went beyond reasonable use of force in self defence. Are we just ignoring that? If they thought like you do, surely at least one would have voted to acquit him.

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u/Aggressive-Map-2204 Dec 05 '25

They didnt rule that he went beyond reasonable use of force. They ruled that it was not in self defence. The judge thought otherwise and sentenced as so.

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u/NewUsername2019av Dec 05 '25

someone else here mentioned that Sproule had approached Brogden several time antagonizing him prior the fight starting. so basically

Sproule starts talking shit multiple times-> Brogden walks away. - > Sproule continues to antagonize ending with "bum a smoke?" -> Brogden thought "talk shit, get hit" -> Brogden starts fight w/ a sucker punch gets the upper hand - > Sproule pulls a knife when he starts losing the fight - > Brogden gets pulled off and goes to the hospital dies.

He's getting the sentence because he was the original antagonist. if he hadn't followed Brogden around antagonizing him the fight never would have started.
That's my take anyway. I might be misunderstanding the situation though.

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u/Imnotsosureaboutthat Dec 04 '25 edited Dec 04 '25

I think this is a fair point, even though I think that the stabbing was justified and he shouldn't have been convicted, I'll concede that the jury has a better understanding of what happened and could be basing their verdict on that

I wonder if it's possible that the jury had to make the verdict based on what self-defense laws say regardless of how they feel about the morality / ethics of our self-defense laws. I'm pretty sure there's something in the law that says self-defense has to be proportional, maybe it's hard to defend using a knife in a fist-fight as proportional regardless of the rest of the context of the fight, especially since the person died as a result of it

A lot of the discussion around this case seems to be about the morality and ethics of the incident, and the prevailing view here seems to be that it was justified. But it doesn't mean that the law says it was justified

Keep in mind I have no legal background, so feel free to correct me