Ten years minimum.(Robert Latimer 's sentence)

Knowing that everything Robert Latimer said about the child he murdered was false, the Supreme Court sent him to jail.

Editor's note. This first appeared in Report Magazine, which can be found at www.report.com. It is reprinted with the author's permission.

For the past seven years northern Saskatchewan farmer Robert Latimer has argued that he was not being treated fairly by Canada's justice system. But his accusations reached a new zenith last month when he accused the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) of being "twisted" and devoid of "understanding" after the court upheld by a vote of 7-0 his second-degree murder conviction in the death of his 12-year-old daughter Tracy in October 1993. Latimer was especially angry that the court rejected his argument that the Criminal Code's mandatory minimum life sentence with no parole for 10 years for anyone convicted of second-degree murder amounted to a violation of his Charter protection against cruel and unusual punishment. Latimer's dissatisfaction with the justice system stems in part from his having undergone two separate jury trials, both of which ended in guilty verdicts that were appealed to the Supreme Court. The highest court threw out his first conviction and ordered a new trial when it was learned prosecutors had questioned potential jurors about their views on mercy killing.

The SCC's final ruling holds that no "aspect of the particular circumstances in this case of the offender diminishes the degree of criminal responsibility borne by Mr. Latimer." Nonetheless, he still insisted that he had acted properly when, on a Sunday morning while wife Laura and his three other children were in church, he propped up Tracy, who from birth had suffered from cerebral palsy, behind the wheel of his pickup truck, and piped in exhaust until she was dead. "This is not a crime," he told reporters after the Supreme Court's decision was released. "Almost everything that's happened have been things that ordinary humans would do."

In a unanimous opinion (Justice Michel Bastarache excused himself because he has suffered the deaths of two disabled children), the justices on the Supreme Court rejected Latimer's attempt to employ the defence of necessity, noting that "the accused did not himself face any peril and Tracy's ongoing pain did not constitute an emergency." Nor were the justices moved by Latimer's belief "that further surgery amounted to imminent peril, particularly when better pain management was available." Tracy was scheduled for surgery to relieve the pain in her dislocated hip the day following her murder.

Beaumont, Alberta, resident and disabled persons advocate Mark Pickup, who suffers from multiple sclerosis himself, says that Latimer should have no beef with how the media has portrayed him. Most of the reporting of the case, he says, emphasized his descriptions of Tracy's pain and suffering, ignoring evidence of the immense enjoyment she got out of life. One study of 80 Latimer-related newspaper headlines, for instance, showed that only 25 had mentioned or alluded to Tracy at all, and only three referred to her without some negative qualifier. Perhaps as a result, a 1999 Angus-Reid poll showed that 73% of Canadians believed that Tracy suffered constantly from unbearable pain.

Mr. Pickup says the media presented the public with a caricature of the case jurors in both trials actually heard. He points out that although Latimer was lauded by his wife as a "100% honest man," court testimony showed he tried to hide his role in Tracy's death, initially stating to police that she had died in her sleep. He cut up and burned the hose that had carried exhaust gases into the truck cab, and when he learned that police investigators were planning an autopsy he insisted she be cremated instead. He confessed to killing his daughter only when police informed him that Tracy's blood possessed lethal levels of carbon monoxide.