FOILED CONVENIENCE STORE ROBBER WANTS HELP WITH DRUG HABIT

Two Years Less A Day Sentence Means Provincial Jail Term

After doing a five-year prison term for robbery, Vance Muir has
concluded provincial reformatories offer better access to drug
treatment programs than federal prisons.

That was the argument he made before Ontario Court Justice William
Fitzgerald Wednesday in asking for a reformatory term rather than a
prison term for his latest convenience store robbery.

Court sentences of less than two years are served in provincial
reformatories, while sentences two years and longer are served in
federal prisons.

In 1999, Muir was sentenced to five years after pleading guilty in an
Oshawa court to two robberies.

Wednesday, in Sudbury court, he pleaded guilty to using a wooden
stick to rob a Notre Dame Avenue convenience store.

He didn't get far with the take, however, as a number of customers in
the store at the time immediately jumped him and held him for police.

Prosecutor Kara Vakiparta said Muir, 32, went into the store just
after midnight June 28 slammed the stick on the counter and demanded money.

He grabbed a cash tray from the store and left, only to be brought
down by a number of customers in the store.

The next day, Muir wrote a letter of apology to the store clerk,
saying he wouldn't have done the robbery, but his life was in danger.

In court, he explained a drug supplier had threatened him if he
didn't pay a $900 debt.

Muir was doing well in a methadone treatment program in Sudbury, but
a move to Espanola interrupted the program and he found himself back
into drugs, his lawyer said.

The stick Muir used, said the lawyer, was something he found in the
store's parking lot. It was two inches by two inches by about four
feet long and appeared to be part of a fence.

"I'm not trying to minimize or justify what I did," Muir told
Fitzgerald, in making a pitch for a provincial reformatory term.

"But the federal system doesn't offer much in the way of treatment."

There were two ways of dealing with Muir, said the judge. One would
be to simply ignore his circumstances and send him away for a lengthy
prison term. But that would only result in him coming out and doing
the same thing again, he suggested.

The second way is to deal with the root cause of his actions. That
means ensuring he has access to proper rehabilitation and treatment
so that when he comes out he won't do the same thing, Fitzgerald said
in sentencing Muir to the maximum reformatory term of two years less a day.