Killer wins appeal for second chance at faint-hope hearing

Convicted killer Ravinder “Robbie” Soomel will get a second chance at early release from prison.
The B.C. Court of Appeal agreed with Soomel that a lower court judge erred in determining whether or not Soomel should be granted a faint hope hearing before a jury.
In December 2018, Justice George Macintosh ruled against the special hearing, saying that there was no “reasonable prospect” that a jury would vote unanimously to lower Soomel’s parole ineligibility period because of his violent history.
“I do not believe a jury voting unanimously could get past the fact that Mr. Soomel killed two times, once in the first-degree murder he orchestrated, and the other in the conspiracy to gun down a man in front of his girlfriend,” Macintosh said at the time.
Soomel was convicted of the first-degree murder of friend-turned-drug trade rival Gurpreet Sohi, who was shot to death in a Delta basement suite in September 2000. And he pleaded guilty in 2010 to conspiracy to commit murder for assisting with the contracted killing of Jason Herle in Abbotsford in 1997.