Law: aggravating vs mitigating

Self-tutoring about Canadian law: the tutor mentions the ideas of aggravating vs mitigating.

The reason I ended up writing about this is the headline about the defeat of a bill in Parliament that would make violence against a pregnant woman an aggravating factor.

I realized, reading the article, that I needed some clarification on what “aggravating” means from a legal perspective.

Aggravating means it’s a factor that makes the crime worse, so may cause the punishment to be more severe. For example, any crime done for the benefit of a criminal organization is seen as worse than that same crime done by (and benefitting) an individual. Therefore, if a crime is done to benefit a criminal organization, that’s an aggravating factor. As a result, said crime may be punished more severely than if the perpetrator had done it independently.

Mitigating, on the other hand, describes a factor that will potentially make the crime less severe in the eyes of the judge. Correspondingly, its sentence may be lighter than the same crime without that mitigating circumstance.

Such is my understanding, anyway.

Interesting, eh?

Source:

laws-lois.justice.gc.ca