As the Crown attorney’s sentencing argument to the judge nears the one-hour mark, it is interrupted by a defence lawyer.

The lawyer’s client, a teenage girl dressed in a baggy sweatshirt — sitting with a Manitoba justice department official, her therapist and a child-welfare worker in the gallery — is scanning the room, her attention seemingly lapsing at her sentencing hearing for a robbery.

“Do you need a break?” provincial court Judge Cynthia Devine gently asks the teen, who nods in affirmation.

It’s mid-afternoon in an otherwise unremarkable provincial courtroom in late July and Devine, whose demeanour already tends to be softer than many of her peers on the bench, is overseeing a sitting of Manitoba’s fetal alcohol spectrum disorder court.

The girl has been diagnosed with the disor

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