Posted on 07/13/2018 1:20:57 PM PDT by Morgana
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.
Hasbrouck says public policies that favour institutional care over home-based supports, and failure to fund such supports, as well as palliative care, deprive disabled people of any real choice in where and how they live. Under those circumstances, how can the choice to die be truly free? she said.
Though Hasbrouck agrees that Tracy Latimer should have received effective pain relief, she finds the statement that Tracy Latimers life should have ended unintentionally as a secondary consequence of her physicians administration of opiates to alleviate her pain, to be ignorant, insulting, and offensive.
Hasbrouck also points to a claim made by Latimers attorney Jason Gratl that [g]ranting a pardon to Mr. Latimer does not detract from any value or principle.
Pardoning Tracys killer would signal a failure of the Governments commitment to equality, justice, and ending discrimination against disabled Canadians, said Hasbrouck.
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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.
Toujours Vivant-Not Dead Yet (TVNDY) is a nonreligious and nonpartisan organization established in 2013 by and for people with disabilities as a project of the Council of Canadians with Disabilities. Our goal is to inform, unify and give voice to the disability rights opposition to assisted suicide, euthanasia, and other life-ending practices that have a disproportionate impact on people with disabilities.
Happened in Canada
he killed his 12 year old daughter now he wants out of jail
Terris list ping. please.
As Trey Gowdy might say,
"I don't give a damn what you want."
Bagster
It says he has been on parole since 2010. If he waits another 5-10 years before requesting a pardon, they may also give him a medal the way things are going.
He should have made it a Murder/Suicide and saved us all the trouble if he was going to kill his own daughter!
Canadian medicine was unable to provide her with pain relief.
He put her in his car and used CO to kill her.
She was never going to get better. It was cerebral palsy of the most severe kind.
It would have been hard for me as a parent to see that pain every day like that.
The statement made about opiates may have been clumsy, but it points up that risking death from them is a worry that should take second place to mercy. Unless the patient themselves so choose otherwise, it is better to risk death, with God ultimately directing whether and when it will happen, than to leave in misery for virtue’s sake.
Even in bible days, such a person would be supplied with copious laudanum, which is a crude opiate.
We should watch our own “anti opiate wars” to be sure such cases don’t get swept up in them. A doctor’s clientele needs to be figured into whether the government needs to be breathing down that doctor’s neck.
This type of argument is called "Putting her out of your misery."
The girl had a right to effective palliative care, which includes pain management: opioids will do the trick at the right dosage. Whether she was ever going to get "better" is unknowable, and in any case irrelevant.
I'm never going to get better, either.
None of us is healthier dead.
You've boiled it down, Mrs. Don-o, to the simplest truth.
The sanctity and the respect for life is no longer a thing in this modern world. Now it's up for debate.
Bagster
Even the most marked mercy should leave at least some room for the person to live if the Lord so opts that the supportive measures suffice. At the same time, very much so there is always “a time to die.” Where the line is in those dark hallways is a question visited by cases like this and like Terri Schiavo’s. I don’t think we’d ever want to purposely starve or suffocate someone guilty of nothing worse than being ill.
Yes. But thanks to all that tattooed, pierced, drug addicted scum, it's getting impossible for people in chronic pain to get the type and amount of medication they need.
But then again we all know that recreational drug use is a "victimless crime".
” As Trey Gowdy might say,
“I don’t give a damn what you want.””
I love you guys!!
Along with her pain was the issue of being unable to feed her and her very low weight. She functioned at the level of a 3 month old.
Just picking her up caused her to cry with pain.
It was a very very difficult hardship for them.
I have compassion for her father and know he meant only to relieve her pain - albeit permanently.
Well, the counter-reaction to it may be even more victimizing. Why, when we hear a government crowing about how it is suing some large consumer of opioids, it never ever tells us what the customer profile IS? It would matter if it’s gaggles of oldsters and hospice clients, for example. It’s like such government only wants to have us hear half the facts! Such a “guardian” as that can well be from hell, and its animating spirit should go back to the hell from which it came. It would be better to let the doped have easy dope.
And guess what, the one who said that is in California and has no weight in Canada.
He's not in jail. He's been free on parole since 2010.
Agreed. This is a serious issue today. Thanks to the addicts....
I worked with hospice patients recently and was happy to see they were getting the pain meds needed.
Not sure if people with health issues are otherwise... it scares me to see physicians backing off from opiates today for people that genuinely need them.
The reason this happens is these half-sighted government attempts to sue and regulate them out of existence. And we call it virtue? And we don’t appeal to Donald Trump about it?
Clientele matters so, so much, and yet the announcements about it never tell us anything about the clientele.
He was a farmer. He had a wife and three other children to care for.
What trouble is he causing you?
FWIW, his daughter Tracy was severely disabled, had no voluntary control of her muscles, wore diapers, could not walk or talk, and lived in constant pain.
Read at least to the SECOND PARAGRAPH.
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