Abusive mother seeks to appeal sentence
Woman sentenced to 9½ years in prison for severe violence on daughter, assaults on other kids challenges prison term because judge went over recommendation
Warning: This story includes graphic descriptions of extreme child abuse.
Counsel for a Fredericton woman who was sentenced to prison time after she admitted earlier this year to horrific abuse of one of her daughters is appealing her sentence.
Provincial court Judge Natalie LeBlanc sentenced a 34-year-old Fredericton woman to 9½ years in prison late last month for six offences related to abusing three of her kids.
There’s a court-ordered publication ban on information that would tend to identify the children, so the Fredericton Independent isn’t naming the offender so as to comply with that order.
The mother pleaded guilty in February to committing an aggravated assault on her daughter by wounding her, and assaulting that child with a weapon (a metal rod), both between June 24 and July 21, 2022, in Fredericton, and to failing to provide the necessaries of life (medical care) for the same child and confining her unlawfully between Jan. 1 and July 21, 2022.
The girl was seven years old at the time.
The offender also admitted to assaulting two of her other kids between Jan. 1 and July 21, 2022.
The woman’s legal counsel, Fredericton lawyer T.J. Burke, filed a notice seeking leave to appeal the sentence, arguing that LeBlanc neglected to follow a key step when she sentenced his client.
“The sentencing judge erred in law when she exceeded the Crown’s recommendation on sentence without first giving adequate notice and inviting the parties to make further sentencing submissions,” he wrote in the notice.
Burke cited a Supreme Court of Canada case from 2022 - R v. Nahanee - in which the country’s top court ruled on such situations, as it involved an Ontario judge imposing a harsher sentence on a sex offender, over and above what the prosecution had suggested.
“... If the sentencing judge presiding over a contested sentencing hearing is of a mind to impose a harsher sentence than what the Crown has proposed, they should notify the parties and give them an opportunity to make further submissions, failing which they run the risk of having the harsher sentence overturned on appeal,” that case states.
During the sentencing hearing for the Fredericton mother, the prosecution sought a sentence of 8½ years in prison, less credit for time served on remand, while the defence recommended 6½ years, less the remand credit.
LeBlanc said since there was no joint recommendation on sentence, the court wasn’t bound by either suggestion.
No date has been yet for a New Brunswick Court of Appeal judge to hear the application seeking leave to appeal the sentence.
In imposing the longer sentence, LeBlanc said the horrific circumstances of the case called out for a stronger message of denunciation and deterrence.
The lesser counts involving the two other children involved the woman slapping them, but it was her treatment of the then-seven-year-old daughter that set the case apart.
Singled out and essentially tortured
Court heard the mother started singling out the girl and abusing her when she was only five years old, though there was no explanation for the change in behaviour or why this one child was the only one subjected to the severe treatment.
The mother used hot metal robs to burn the girl; stomped on her head repeatedly, causing a severe infection and deformation of her ear; regular beatings for soiling herself and for sneaking out of her room to use the bathroom; minimal feeding of foul food; being forced to eat vomit if she threw up that food; confinement to her room; being forced to sleep in a dilapidated bed designed to restrict her movements and breathing; assaults with weapons such as a broomstick and belt; denial of water; yanking hair from her scalp; and denial of regular playtime despite her siblings being allowed to do so.
“The offences involving [the girl] are on the extreme end of the scale,” LeBlanc said when rendering her decision on the sentence.
“These acts were not temporary nor were they short in duration.”
The case has renewed criticism of the child protection services branch of the provincial Department of Social Development.
Court heard child-protection staff had contact with the family in the years before the abuse came to the attention of the Fredericton Police Force.
The children were taken into protective care for several months before the woman’s arrest, but for the most part, they remained in the custody of her and her husband, despite repeated, substantiated reports of abuse.
Court heard a social worker examined the seven-year-old girl in June 2022 and recorded she showed no signs of injury, harm or neglect.
But when doctors saw the girl a month later, they reported the child was covered in bruises and other marks, and was clearly malnourished.
It was also apparent from the girl’s condition that the abuse and neglect had been going on for some time.
Kelly Lamrock, New Brunswick’s child and youth advocate, is reviewing the case to determine what went wrong.
The Department of Social Development has declined to comment on the case.
The father of the children was also charged with failing to provide the necessaries of life to the child who was severely abused, and he’s awaiting trial on that charge as well as an alleged breach of conditions to have no contact with his children.
During the mother’s sentencing hearing, court heard the father worked several jobs and was rarely home.
He was the one who finally called police July 21, 2022, telling officers his wife was crazy and was hurting their daughter.
Don MacPherson can be contacted at ftonindependent@gmail.com.