Thursday 19 July 2018

Latimer Redux -- Before We Talk PARDON, Let's Review, Shall We?, Part 2 -- Who is the REAL Robert Latimer?


Originally published in The Western Report on September 4, 1995, the following article by Joe Woodard offers some interesting insights into Robert Latimer’s history with, and possibly his learned method of dealing with, the law…

WHO IS THE REAL ROBERT LATIMER?


The judge who sentenced him for rape now calls him salt of the earth

In mid-July, the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal ruled against Robert Latimer's appeal of his second degree murder conviction. The three-judge panel unanimously upheld the decision of a jury in Latimer's original trial last November, where he was found guilty of killing his severely disabled 12-year-old daughter, Tracy. But one of the appeal court judges, Chief Justice E.D. Bayda, disagreed with the ten-year minimum sentence. He asserted that it was "cruel and unusual" punishment in Latimer's circumstances. He also recommended a "constitutional exemption" from the minimum sentence, based on his reading of Latimer's character and motivations. Because of Justice Bayda's dissent, Latimer is now free to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. In the meantime, he is out on bail.

In his dissent, Justice Bayda describes Robert Latimer as "typical salt of the earth...a devoted family man...loving, caring, nurturing." The "tragically disfigured" Tracy was "born clinically dead and need[ed] to be resuscitated" and thenceforth lived in constant pain. When Latimer put his daughter in his truck and piped lethal exhaust gases into its cab, he was "motivated by love, mercy and compassion..." Justice Bayda also noted that "the appellant has no criminal record. He poses no risk to society and requires no rehabilitation."

Latimer's record was indeed clean, despite the fact that he was convicted of rape in 1974. In May of that year, a jury in Battleford, Sask. found the then-21-year-old Latimer and another young man guilty in the rape of a 15-year-old girl in the nearby town of Wilkie on Sept. 8, 1973.

By remarkable coincidence, the presiding judge at Latimer's rape trial was none other than Justice E.D. Bayda. Thus, 21 years later, he would have been acutely aware of Latimer's clean criminal record, because the rape conviction was overturned on appeal when the trial judge was found to have erred in his handling of the case. The appeal court ruled that Justice Bayda had not permitted sufficient examination of the girl's previous sexual history, and that he'd hurried the jury's deliberations. The case was sent back to Battleford for retrial, but the Crown declined to prosecute anew.

The appeal court decision effectively quashed the public record of Latimer's rape conviction, which is why it was not brought up at his murder trial and appeal, nor will it be heard at his Supreme Court hearing. "I question the relevance of a 21-year-old charge," says Latimer's current lawyer, Mark Brayford.

While it's odd that the judge who presided over the rape trial that found Latimer guilty would now describe him as "salt of the earth," there are other aspects of Justice Bayda's assessment of the murder case that confound people like Saskatoon doctor Sheila Harding, herself the mother of a disabled child. "We only have his wife's word that [Latimer] was a good father, that Tracy was born dead, and that she couldn't be given pain-killers for her dislocated hip. What do we really know?"

Knowingly or unknowingly, Laura Latimer did introduce some inaccuracies into her husband's murder trial--and they were echoed in Justice Bayda's later dissent. "At birth, Tracy was healthy, with good APGARs [a test of newborns' vital signs]," says Richard Snyder, director of child development at Saskatoon's Kinsmen's Children's Centre. "She had to be resuscitated later her first day, but lots of babies do. And she could be given analgesics for her pain." Dr. Snyder surmises that Tracy was probably always uncomfortable, but quickly adds, "I certainly don't think we can go around killing our children."

Wednesday 18 July 2018

Latimer Redux -- Before We Talk PARDON, Let's Review, Shall We?, Part 1


Last week, multiple news outlets reported that Robert Latimer has submitted a letter to the Minister of Justice seeking a pardon or a new trial following his conviction for the murder of his daughter Tracy in 1993.  When I heard these reports, I, like many Canadians with disabilities, felt a sickening sense of deja vous.  

From the time Latimer was first arrested for killing Tracy, he  portrayed his daughter as little more than a suffering bundle of flesh. And, from the beginning, the mainstream media was quick to promote this image of Tracy. This monolithic mainstream  media portrayals of Tracy as constantly and intractably suffering continued throughout Latimer’s trials, even when testimony from Tracy’s mother and teachers clearly showed that Tracy was quite capable of enjoying her life. But two-and-half decades after Tracy Latimer was murdered by her father, some mainstream media reports about his petition for a pardon still described Tracy as a “bedridden quadriplegic,” despite the fact that Tracy rode the school bus to her school program right up until the weekend that her father murdered her.


So, in order to save myself many, MANY hours of typing, (not to mention possibly saving what little, if anything, is left of my sanity), I will, for the time being, be dedicating this blog  to posting previous-published articles which highlight what the mainstream media appears to consider inconvenient truths about Tracy Latimer and her life.

Tracy Latimer's legacy; What of other children with disabilities? What of aging parents with
dementia?

Janz, Heidi L . Edmonton Journal ; Edmonton, Alta. [Edmonton, Alta]15 Mar 2008: A.19.

Thirteen-and-a-half years, two court trials and thousands of media reports after Robert Latimer gassed his 12-year-old daughter Tracy to death in his pickup truck, his legal saga has come to an end.

Late last month, the National Parole Board Appeal Division reversed a decision in early December by a three-person panel of the parole board that denied parole to Latimer, saying he refused to acknowledge his actions were a crime.

In a written decision, the appeal division said the denial could not be supported in law and a delay in releasing Latimer "would be unfair."

It said the circumstances of Latimer's offence were "unique" and it was unlikely he would find himself in a similar high-risk situation.

So, what have we, as Canadians, learned about life, death, and disability through the whole saga of the Latimer case?

In my mind, and in the minds of most Canadians with disabilities and their supporters, frighteningly little.

A chief reason for this, I would argue, is that so much of the mainstream media's coverage of the Latimer case has consistently been characterized by one-sided, often blatantly erroneous, portrayals of Tracy Latimer as an unfortunate, less-than-human being, whose pain-filled and burdensome existence was bravely sustained by her stoic and heroic parents. Indeed, most media stories about the Latimer case were, and are, constructed around the dichotomy of Tracy as a pain-ridden subhuman being versus Robert as a long-suffering, devoted parent.

The glaring problem -- and, indeed, the grave danger -- inherent in this typical mainstream media portrayal of Tracy Latimer as a perpetually suffering, subhuman being is that it flies in the face of Tracy's actual day-to-day lived experience, as it was revealed in the court testimony of her caregivers and even her own mother.

What's more, the apparently general public acceptance of this portrayal of Tracy Latimer blatantly ignores the experience of thousands of Canadians who live with severe disabilities and chronic pain, while systematically undermining the value of their lives.

Given the enormous stakes implicit in the Latimer case -- both for those of us currently living with disabilities, and for those of us who are still currently temporarily-able-bodied (TABs), -- I feel it is imperative at this juncture to critically compare the facts of Tracy Latimer's life with the one-sided image of her that has been constructed and promulgated by the mainstream media.

The Problem of Pain: One of the most common descriptors of Tracy Latimer is that she was in constant, unremitting pain. For example, the subheading of an article in the March 1995 issue of Saturday Night reads, "With his little girl in constant pain, Bob Latimer just couldn't see the point of any more operations. Enough was enough."

Indeed, a great number of mainstream media stories about the Latimer case were written in this vein. However, as Dick Sobsey, Director of the University of Alberta's John Dossetor Health Ethics Centre, has pointed out, the widely accepted notion that Tracy Latimer was in constant, unremitting pain is, in fact, an assumption that is fraught with numerous logical and factual inconsistencies: numerous sources printed a direct quote from Latimer's lawyer, describing Tracy as both in a "vegetative state" and "undergoing tremendous pain as a result of degenerative disease."

Since a person in a vegetative state is not conscious of or highly reactive to pain, it is difficult to understand how such a statement would be accepted without question. 

The fact that cerebral palsy is not a degenerative disease adds to the misinformation. In early accounts of Tracy's suffering, she was described as "wracked with bedsores" (Craig, 1993, Nov. 5) and no mention is made of a hip dislocation. Later, the hip dislocation became the source of her unrelenting suffering. Tracy Latimer was repeatedly described as being in unrelenting distress. Yet, in Mr. Latimer's confession, she was in no distress the Sunday morning that he killed her. 

One can't help but wonder how much of this kind of misinformation has affected the way in which judges and jurors have viewed Tracy as well, if only subconsciously. 

It seems at least a distinct possibility that, in describing Mr. Latimer's situation as "unique," members of the National Parole Board Appeal Division had in mind the idea that Tracy was in constant, unremitting pain when her father killed her. But the simple fact that Tracy was evidently well enough to attend school just two days before her death should raise serious questions about just how much pain she was really experiencing. 

Not Dead, Or Even Dying, Yet: Closely connected with the erroneous yet widely-accepted notion that Tracy was in constant, unremitting pain is the equally false idea that her condition -- i.e., her disability -- was progressive, and, ultimately, terminal.

Frequent though its appearances are in over a decade's worth of coverage of the Latimer case, this notion has its roots, not in any kind of empirical knowledge of cerebral palsy, but rather in the erroneous, yet culturally-entrenched, assumption that the presence of a disabling condition is intrinsically linked to a shortened lifespan, or at least to a low "quality of life" which is comparable to the "quality of life" of someone who is at the end of their life.

In other words, because Tracy had a severe disability, it was, in many cases, assumed either that she was dying, or at least that the "quality of life" that she experienced was so poor that she may as well have been dying -- or dead. 

Not Quite Human? It can, I think, easily be argued and demonstrated that the cumulative effect of these factual misrepresentations of Tracy's life is to turn her into a somehow less-than-human being, who was actually better off dead than living with such severe disabilities. 

This kind of subtext is readily apparent in the media's pat description of her as someone who "could not walk, talk, or feed herself." It is this assumption that Tracy's life was somehow less worthy -- if not completely unworthy -- of being lived that makes the Latimer case of enormous significance for all Canadians.

Even though Robert Latimer's legal saga is now over, the ripple effects of his actions will continue to be felt in this country for years to come. If the value of a person's life is ultimately contingent on a person's ability to walk, talk and feed themselves, what are we to do with the rest of our children with severe disabilities? And what of the growing numbers of our parents with dementia?

For me, as for thousands of other vulnerable Canadians, these are haunting questions. Our very lives depend on their answers.

Copyright Southam Publications Inc. Mar 15, 2008