Where co-offenders have significantly different subjective circumstances — particularly where one has a far worse criminal record, is on parole for an identical offence, and has virtually nil prospects of rehabilitation — a relatively small difference in head sentences may be justified notwithstanding that the other co-offender played a more serious role in the offence. The parity principle does not require proportional reduction in sentence to reflect differences in objective criminality where the subjective differences between co-offenders operate in the opposite direction.
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