Canada

After he was charged with possessing child pornography, Nathan Allen Joseph Legault discovered a figure from his past he hoped might help with his future.

The Prince Rupert, B.C., man — a former Baptist associate pastor — learned that a great-great-grandmother had been Métis, and based on that distant connection he asked for the special consideration Canada's highest court mandates for sentencing Indigenous offenders.

The judge who heard the case ultimately found that Legault had nothing in his life experience as a newly self-identified Indigenous person to lessen the "moral blameworthiness" he bore for sending graphic images of himself to teenage girls.

Judge David Patterson didn't rule on whether Legault is or is not actually Métis — that's not his job. But in reluctantly ordering a sentence that will see the 30-year-old avoid hard jail time, he warned that courts need to deal with non-Indigenous offenders trying to game the system.