The minute the victim's family were told the teen goons who split their aging dad's skull with a bat in a public washroom had been convicted of manslaughter, not second-degree murder, they figured the penalty would be a joke.

And they were right.

This week, B.C. Supreme Court Judge William Grist sentenced the 13-year-old, the younger of the two killers, to three years for Shingara Thandi's fatal beating, not because he believed it was all the hooligan deserved but because the architects of the nation's youth-crime law decided three years is as bad as it gets for teenagers convicted of manslaughter.