Where co-offenders share equal responsibility for joint offending but have significantly different personal circumstances (prior record, rehabilitation prospects, intellectual impairment, age), near-identical sentences on jointly committed offences may give rise to a justifiable sense of grievance warranting appellate intervention on parity grounds. An offender's intellectual impairment may moderate the weight given to general deterrence but has no moderating impact on the sentencing consideration of community protection. A sentencing court may consider the relevance of intellectual impairment to general deterrence even where defence counsel has eschewed reliance on the Verdins principles.
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