By The 24-year-old Canadian actor, known for his role in the popular teen series as well as parts in shows such as Supernatural and iZombie, pleaded guilty to killing his 64-year-old mother Barbara Waite after fatally shooting her in the head. He was also plotting to kill Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau.
Grantham was charged with second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the first 14 years.
His lawyer, Chris Johnson, is now arguing that Ryan shouldn’t be housed in a maximum-security prison, telling TMZ the actor could be “physically, psychologically and sexually intimidated” by hardened criminals.
Johnson also told Fox News: “My biggest concern is that he will be preyed upon by other prisoners and perhaps abused by them. We send people to prison to be both punished and rehabilitated. And so, I’m hopeful that the latter can take place. We don’t send people to prison so they can be punished by other prisoners.”
After the verdict, Johnson said: “It was, I think, the lowest possible sentence we could expect given the circumstances. There’s a lot of aspects to the case that are more equivalent to first degree murder than they are with second degree.”
According to Johnson, Justice Ker requested that corrections authorities send Grantham to a medium-security prison instead of a maximum-security facility.
Johnson explained that, in the Canadian court system, the court has no authority to determine which institution an offender serves time. He said once an offender is sentenced, correction authorities have jurisdiction over that decision.
“All the judge in our case could do is make a recommendation,” Johnson said.
He also stated that Justice Ker requested “to find out whether that was absolute or whether there was any exception to that.”
“And we did find out that there could possibly be an exception to that, which is you can make a request to the director of prisons,” Johnson said. “And, so essentially, she asked us to do that.”
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