Parents Who Kill

Tragically, necessity seems to be forcing the Canadian justice system to consider how we should treat parents who kill their disabled children.

It’s a fact that parents who care for children with disabilties are under enormous pressure.  There’s not enough funding for adequate supports in the home.  There aren’t enough options for effective, person-centred community supports.  It can be difficult, in this age of cut-backs and lay-offs, to  children what they need in the education, health, and social service systems; parents need to educated about their child’s rights, about the “systems” in which they’re involved, and about the most effective ways to advocate.  They need to do this and keep their families, jobs, and rest of their lives together.  It’s overwhelming.

For Robert Latimer, to do all this and to see his daughter in constant pain was too much. 

http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/307738 

I think that anyone who has ever seen their child in pain and wanted to do something, anything, to ease it, can imagine on some small scale what Rober Latimer must have been feeling when he put his daughter into a truck cab and pumped exhaust into it; I think we can appreciate that Robert Latimer wasn’t a hardened criminal, but a desparate parent, and his sentence reflected that.

However, Robert Latimer is being released on day parole this weekend, after an appeal to the Parole Board made after his December hearing; not because he adequately expressed remorse, which was why he was originally denied parole in December, but because the Parole Board feels he not likely to reoffend.

That’s all very well and good; but will this be the precedent?  The courts are going to have to ask if “not likely to reoffend” in the face of not showing adequate remorse is enough, considering that a mother recently drowned her autistic toddler in the bathtub after being told that surgery was not going to correct his developmental delays.

http://www.thestar.com/article/301289

Are these parents really likely to offend again anyway, given the circumstances of their crimes? 

Is it reasonable to expect them to show some remorse before letting them leave prison?  The Parole Board’s recent actions don’t seem to indicate so.

So what are we really imprisoning them for?  Is it just because we don’t know what else to do with a parent in that situation?

Tough questions.  Perhaps Tracy Latimer and Scarlett Chen may have expressed an opinion on it at some point…but they’re not here, are they?