The parity principle applies to co-offenders charged with different offences arising from the same criminal enterprise, and a marked disparity between a custodial and non-custodial sentence for co-offenders of equal criminality may give rise to a justifiable sense of grievance warranting appellate intervention, even where the co-offenders have different criminal histories. The factual basis upon which an offender is sentenced (including unresolved questions such as which co-offender committed the act of violence) is critical to the parity analysis.
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