Canadian Mother Who Strangled Daughter Won't Be Jailed, Judge Rules

Story here. Excerpt:

'A judge's decision to free a Canadian mother convicted of strangling her 14-year-old daughter with a head scarf has prompted growing outrage from victims' advocates groups.

A suspended sentence was given to Aset Magomadova, 40, by Court of Queen's Bench Justice Sal LoVecchio on Thursday, stunning a national victims' group based in Toronto, the Vancouver Sun reports.

"I really strongly disagree," said Joe Wamback, founder and chairman of the Canadian Crime Victims Foundation. "It sends a message to the rest of the community and the world that her daughter's life was valueless."'

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Ed. note: Barbara Kay comments here. Excerpt:

'Apparently Magomadova’s lawyer really got to the judge with an account of the defendant’s “catastrophic” background in war-torn Chechnya, where her husband was killed in conflict while she was pregnant with a son who later was born with Muscular Dystrophy.

I would venture to say that many killers have a “particular situation.” Robert Latimer springs to mind. Robert Latimer was a white Canadian male of European extraction, so perhaps his “particular situation,” that of watching his profoundly disabled daughter Tracy, a victim of Cerebral Palsy, suffer the agonies of the damned for years in spite of every possible medical intervention available (which amounted to, in Latimer’s words, “mutilation and torture”), could not quite compete with the sad tale of a Muslim widow from Chechnya with an irritating daughter and a son with Muscular Dystrophy.

Latimer was convicted of second degree murder, but the judge in his second trial opted for leniency on the grounds that he acted from “compassion,” ordering a light sentence of one year in jail and one under house arrest. Not good enough for the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal, which insisted on the full weight of the law being applied, namely a life sentence. Latimer pleaded to the Supreme Court of Canada that he had had no choice but to end her suffering. Nope, the Supreme Court said, Latimer had other options and a ten-year sentence was not “excessive.”'