A young choir singer who admitted to participating in Vancouver's Stanley Cup riot has offered an apology to the city during a court appearance.
Twenty-year-old Emmanuel Alviar of Surrey pleaded guilty in March to mischief and participating in a riot and asked for forgiveness during a sentencing hearing Thursday.
"I want to apologize to the people of Vancouver for my part in the riot. Instead of trying to keep the peace, I added to the chaos," he told the court.
He went on to say he's already paying the price for his actions in the court of public opinion.
Alviar has no previous criminal record, but video evidence released by the court this week shows him in a black hoodie, pushing a car and throwing a barricade into a store window during the chaos of June 15, 2011. A month later, he found his picture on a website dedicated to identifying rioters.
Defence lawyer Gary Botting says his client turned himself in to police soon after.
"He gave himself up almost right away, long before a warrant was issued. They probably couldn't have identified him, wouldn't have been interested in somebody who was doing the minor things that he was doing," Botting told reporters outside Vancouver provincial court.
The lawyer asked for a one-year conditional sentence to be served in the community, arguing that jail is too severe a punishment for Alviar.
"For a person who's a first offender, with the very minor role that he had in this, that's no place to send a person 20 years old," Botting said.
But prosecutors are arguing for a four-month prison term.
"The Crown and the court take into account the fact that an individual's actions aren't necessarily isolated from that of the group as a whole," Crown spokesman Neil MacKenzie said.
Alviar is set to receive his sentence next month.
With a report from CTV British Columbia's Bhinder Sajan
