Crown prosecutors making submissions on sentencing range should frame those submissions as the view of the Crown, not as the opinion of an individual Crown officer such as the Chief Crown Prosecutor. Where a sentencing judge states that a mitigating factor has been taken into account, an appellate court will not entertain the argument that it was not taken into account unless the sentence is explicable only on the basis that the factor was effectively ignored. A sentencing judge is not required to adopt a two-stage approach of fixing a notional sentence and then applying a percentage discount for cooperation or guilty plea.
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