Mon Apr 11/05
Not nearly enough

I've recently been on about the counter-intuitiveness of abortion term limits as compared to society's pleasingly egalitarian revulsion for murderers. Murdering an infant, I've pointed out, is the same thing as murdering an adult, and so it should be. Things like this make me wonder, though — not about abortion or child murder, but about that argument. It's considerably weaker after today.

Clara Dasilva, the infanticidal ghoul who left her two-year-old daughter alone in an apartment to die of dehydration, has been sentenced to three years in prison. "Three years," said an unsympathetic Mark Yetman, the baby's father. "My daughter only lived to be two." Oof. That does put it in perspective somewhat. I guess we won't mention that she's eligible for parole in six months, then?

I tend to resist reactionary impulses, because they're pretty much always wrong, but what the hell: that sentence is grotesque. I don't know if she deserves more time because she was out salsa dancing while her daughter lay dying, though the story is certainly more repulsive because of it, but it should hardly matter — she'd deserve more than three years if she'd been stuck under a subway train. As it stands, it seems obvious that her goal was to kill the child through neglect. Had it not been, I would have expected her to plead insanity, since no sane person would be surprised that her actions would kill a two-year-old girl.

Whatever purposes our justice system serves — punishment, rehabilitation, vengeance, protection, deterrence, whatever — three years for an adult who kills another human being is an abomination, an affront to each purpose and to all of them taken together. The Crown should stop "considering" its appeal of the sentence and appeal the damn thing. Once Dasilva's sentence has been bumped up to the still-too-lenient 8-to-12 the prosecution was pushing for, the Crown can explain to the people of Ontario why this caricature of human misery and moral decrepitude was allowed to plead to manslaughter in the first place.