Girl’s Tragic Death Moves Judge, Jury to Look Beyond the Law

It’s been three years since Robert Latimer’s fate first consumed Canada, and the country still remains convulsed. So fractious is the debate over Latimer that those involved can’t even agree what it’s about. Euthanasia, mercy-killing, slippery slopes, rights of the disabled, the value of human life, the limits of the legal system--at least indirectly, all these topics were examined in a Battleford, Saskatchewan, courtroom last month.

None of them, however, shaped the outcome of Latimer’s second murder trial for the killing of his disabled 12-year-old daughter, Tracy. Justice and philosophy in the end gave way to something far more fundamental: one man’s sense of right and wrong.

Latimer, 44 now, known as “Laddie” to his neighbors, grew up on the 1,280-acre wheat farm his father bought 50 years ago on the prairies of western Canada. He was never a man of many words or opinions. He harvested his wheat, he attended church, he helped raise the four children his wife, Laura, bore him.

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Their eldest, Tracy, required far more attention than the others. Born with a severe form of cerebral palsy, the result of brain injury at birth, she couldn’t walk or talk. She couldn’t eat without a stomach tube. At 12, she had the mentality of a 3-month-old. She was in diapers; she weighed 38 pounds; she suffered four or five seizures a day. She also was in constant pain: She couldn’t receive painkillers because they would react with her anti-convulsive medication.

Doctors had operated three times to little effect, placing rods in her spine, correcting bone curvatures, severing convulsive muscles. Then in late 1993, the Latimers’ orthopedic surgeon told them they needed to saw off the top of Tracy’s right hip. The doctor couldn’t promise that this latest surgery would end or even relieve Tracy’s pain; by no means would it be the last. That night the two parents held each other and cried. Robert Latimer only pretended to fall sleep beside his wife, though. Instead, he began to plan Tracy’s death.

He was not an impulsive or angry man, a psychiatrist who examined him later would say. He was, rather, the “salt of the earth”; he thought he could “lie in a dirty old jail cell” easier than Tracy could “lie on the floor.” An overdose of Valium? A gunshot in the head? Harvesting his grain crop during the next few days, Latimer weighed these and other methods. Then he decided.

While his wife and three younger children attended church services on Sunday morning, Oct. 24, 1993, Latimer put Tracy into the cab of their pickup truck, turned on the engine, hooked up a hose, piped in the carbon monoxide. If Tracy had started to cry, he told investigators soon after in a voluntary confession, he’d have stopped the engine. But instead she fell quietly to sleep. “My priority was to put her out of her pain,” he said. “I was doing what I thought right.”

Chorus of Opinions

A groundswell of support quickly built for Latimer among neighbors and Canadian citizens. Others, however, rushed in with uncommon if not unexpected haste to appropriate the Latimer affair. Right-to-die groups, right-to-life groups, advocates for the disabled--all clamored to explain what Tracy’s death meant.

We need expanded euthanasia laws, the death-with-dignity proponents maintained. We need to distinguish between euthanasia and coldblooded murder. We need a more flexible judicial system. The Latimer case is just the “tip of the iceberg.” Latimer was just “the person who got caught.”

Advocates for the disabled responded with indignation: It’s not the “role of the able-bodied” to decide that lives of the disabled are “so meritless they must be terminated.” Tracy’s problem was that she “didn’t match one man’s definition of human.” Public support for Latimer “serves as a painful reminder of the extreme vulnerability of people with disabilities.”

It’s hard to say whether any of those drawn into this exchange recognized that however much they wanted the Latimer family’s experience to validate their views, the situation just was not that accommodating.

On the one hand, the issue involved nothing so simple as euthanasia. Even if such assisted suicide were decriminalized, as is being considered both in Canada and the United States, Latimer’s act would still be illegal: Tracy didn’t consent, Tracy didn’t choose death. On the other hand--as there always is in these matters--Tracy couldn’t have made choices about her breakfast tray, let alone her destiny. So instead a choice was made for her, not by society or legislators or special-interest groups, but by one of the two people who knew her best and cared about her most.

Right or wrong? Disdain for the disabled or mercy for the suffering? An act of selfishness or courage? In the end it didn’t matter, for in a court of law Tracy’s death wasn’t about any of these issues. In a court of law, Tracy’s death was a simple case of murder.

At the first trial in November 1994, jurors wept as they listened to Latimer’s confession being read out loud, then heard Justice Ross Wimmer tell them: “You cannot let your passion or your feelings stand in the way of reason.” Given a narrow choice by the judge, the jurors found Latimer guilty of second-degree murder. Given no choice by mandatory guidelines, Wimmer, saying, “There is no joy in this for anyone,” sentenced Latimer to life, with a minimum of 10 years. “I still feel I did what was right,” Latimer declared on the courthouse steps afterward. “I don’t think you people are being human.”

Many across Canada agreed: Thousands of letters and about $100,000 in donations inundated the Latimers. Rather than resolve matters, the jury’s verdict served only to fuel an ever-expanding argument. The law is too blunt an instrument; why not create an offense of third-degree mercy-killing? What of a society that forbids what Latimer did but offers no alternatives? What of modern medicine, which saved Tracy’s life at birth but then offered no cure or escape? For that matter, what of a medical system that has never adequately explained to the Latimers just how Tracy was deprived of oxygen at birth?

Second Chance

Latimer’s second chance, it goes without saying, sprang not from such questions but rather from a lawyer’s misdeed: At Latimer’s first trial, the prosecution had secretly questioned prospective jurors about their views on mercy-killing. In overturning Latimer’s conviction last February, the Canadian Supreme Court pointedly declared that “[the matter before us] is not about those questions which have dominated public debate. . . . It is not about the legality and morality of mercy-killing.”

So the second trial started on Oct. 27 with much the same tenor as the first. Once again a judge restricted the jurors to a narrow choice: Did or did not Latimer kill his daughter? Once again the jurors felt frustrated and reluctant--”I don’t feel good about this in my heart. . . . This will bother me for a long time.” And once again, the jurors found Latimer guilty of second-degree murder.

This time, however, they didn’t stop there. During their deliberations, the jurors asked Justice Ted Noble about Latimer’s potential sentence, only to have Noble say he couldn’t tell them. Now, after the verdict, upon finally learning that Latimer would get mandatory life with a minimum of 10 years, the jurors gasped and wept and clasped their hands to their mouths. Then they rebelled.

Informed that they could recommend a parole date between 10 and 25 years hence, the jurors, after 20 minutes of deliberation, instead urged that Latimer be considered for parole in just one year. It was an unprecedented and unenforceable suggestion, called “symbolic” by court commentators, yet it was followed soon after by another one: Latimer’s lawyer asked Noble to strike down Latimer’s mandatory life sentence as constitutionally prohibited cruel and unusual punishment.

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On Dec. 1, the judge, to the surprise of many, did just that: He sentenced Latimer to two years less a day, with the first year to be spent in jail, the second on probation at his farm. It was the first time a mandatory minimum sentence for murder had been set aside by a Canadian court.

Some celebrated, others wailed, the prosecutor announced that he would appeal, and just about everyone rushed once more to explain what “message was sent” by this outcome.

No message was sent, though--or rather, not one related to all the weighty issues so eagerly attached to the Latimer case these last four years. All that happened, finally, was that 12 jurors and a judge, stepping beyond the law and the lobbying and the unanswerable questions, thought Robert Latimer belonged not in a “dirty old jail cell” but on his farm, harvesting his wheat and caring for his family.