Does Latimer Deserve Leniency?
Robert Latimer was denied day parole this past week. For those unfamiliar with Robert Latimer he is newsworthy because on October 24, 1993 he placed his daughter Tracy in his truck, and connected a hose from the exhaust pipe to the inside of the truck where Tracy sat. An autopsy found high levels of carbon monoxide in Tracy’s blood.
All this happened while the rest of the Latimer family was at church. It was Latimer’s wife Laura who found Tracy dead in her bed. Latimer originally maintained that she had died in her sleep.
After a lengthy period of trials and appeals, Robert Latimer began spending his second-degree murder sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole for 10 years on January 18, 2001.
All of this seems very uncontroversial, perhaps even black and white, and yet in 1999, 3 out of every 4 Canadians believed Latimer should have been treated more leniently. This interpretation seems bizarre, until we consider that Tracy had a severe form of cerebral palsy, and yet the Law which says that one person must not take the life of another, just as much applies to the mentally or physically ill like Tracy as it does to healthy girls of her age. If it doesn’t, if the state of a person’s health is seen as the factor determining whether such a person has a right to live or not, then Tracy will not be the only victim, and fearing this, appropriately, because Latimer has shown no remorse for his act, he remains imprisoned.
K.
And as far as Im concerned, his sentence was not long enough….. when we have children, we are not guaranteed healthy ones. His poor daughter suffered, yes, and yet so do many others. And other parents find other ways of coping and loving and helping. His answer for his child was to gas her to death. And not even done in the midst of insanity or grief, he planned it very carefully. He is a cold and calculating murderer, and if our law does not protect a child who is ill, then it does not protect any of us. Good, that he was denied parole. So many decisions by the parole board are just stupid and senseless, but this was a good one.kate
Comment by Kate — December 8, 2007 @ 3:21 pm
Right, if this was a healthy child, there would be no uncertainty about what to do with Latimer.
Why, since the child is sick, do we seem to tolerate, a second legal system, one that is more lenient on those who take advantage of such sufferers, and one that is lenient on those who believe that it is their place to end the miseries of others, by putting an end to their lives?
Our laws are to keep all people safe, especially the ones that are in need of protection. Laws cannot be bypassed, or seen to be irrelevant, simply because a child is mentally or physically sick.
K.
Comment by K. — December 8, 2007 @ 3:36 pm
Whether I agree or not is not the point, but humans do the same thing to their beloved pets every day. We see the animal that we love going through much pain, and instead of letting it continue to suffer we take it to the vet and put it out of it’s misery. I don’t think we should be playing God, and I don’t know what I would do if I were in this case. I would like to say that I wouldn’t do what Latimer did, and instead I would try to give the child a chance at a “normal” life. But I also hate to see people suffer in pain (especially children).
Comment by Laura Cave — January 22, 2008 @ 9:34 am