TRACY LATIMER MUST NOT BE ERASED; HER MURDER MUST NOT BE PARDONED

Media Release

THE COUNCIL OF CANADIANS WITH DISABILITIES (CCD) OPPOSES ROBERT LATIMER’S PETITON FOR A NEW TRIAL OR A PARDON

For Immediate Release | July 12, 2018

Multiple news outlets are reporting 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. 

Latimer has been free on parole since 2010.  Contrary to some media reports, Latimer has been able to travel outside Canada since 2015, according to the Globe and Mail. 

Disability rights activists are concerned that the pardon request is a “symptom and effect of the continuing devaluation of disabled people” as shown by the legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia in 2016, according to Amy Hasbrouck, director of Toujours Vivant-Not Dead Yet.  She notes that individual choice is supposed to be key to the suspension of homicide laws in cases of assisted suicide and euthanasia.  “Yet Tracy was not given a choice.”

Dr. Heid Janz, Chair of CCD’s Ending-of-Life Ethics Committee, expresses profound dismay at the mainstream media’s continuing practice of disseminating entirely erroneous descriptions of Tracy Latimer’s condition. “Some reports on Latimer’s petition revived the decades’ old false description of Tracy Latimer as a bed-ridden quadriplegic,” Janz said. “But the fact, documented in all of Latimer’s trials, is that Tracy rode the school bus to her school program right up until the weekend that her father murdered her.”

“Such misinformation typifies the distortion and devaluation of Tracy Latimer’s life that has been ongoing in the mainstream media since Robert Latimer was first arrested, and is now continuing with his petition for a re-trial or a pardon,” Janz said.

Hasbrouck also points to a claim made by Latimer’s attorney Jason Gratl that "[g]ranting a pardon to Mr. Latimer does not detract from any value or principle.”

“Pardoning Tracy’s killer would signal a failure of the Government’s commitment to equality, justice, and ending discrimination against disabled Canadians,” said Hasbrouck.

She noted that the Latimer conviction was “the exception to the rule” that parents who kill their disabled children receive more lenient treatment from the criminal justice system than do parents who kill their non-disabled children.

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Heidi Janz,
Chair, Ending-of-Life Ethics Committee, Council of Canadians with Disabilities
hjanz@ualberta.ca

Jewelles Smith,
Chair, Council of Canadians with Disabilities
jewelles.smith@gmail.com