Crime and Justice

Providing readers with the latest crime and justice news from around Canada but with particular interest to Winnipeg, and my Liberal minded opinions about decisions and issues pertaining to crime, justice, and sentencing. I advocate for prison and criminal justice reform, more prisoners' rights, rehabilitation and community based corrections. I believe society needs to address the root causes of crime and underlying factors as opposed to simply "getting tough" and over-relying on imprisonment.

Friday, March 12, 2010

Mother tells trial she didn't know toddler drank fatal dose of methadone

Mother tells trial she didn't know toddler drank fatal dose of methadone
Mom pleads ignorance in baby's methadone death

CALGARY - The mother of a toddler who died after drinking a lethal dose of methadone took the stand in her own defence this morning, telling the court she did not know 16-month-old Summer Hope had consumed the synthetic opiate before the little girl died.

Lisa Guerin (also known as Lisa Hope) testified she never said her daughter drank methadone, nor that it had happened when she left Calgary on April 29 for Rocky Mountain House where she had work as an exotic dancer and planned to meet her boyfriend while her husband stayed at home with the couple's two children.

Summer died on April 30. Toxicology results showed the cause was an overdose of methadone and the little girl had enough in her system to kill an adult.

Guerin, 30, and Jonathan Hope, are charged with manslaughter, criminal negligence causing death, and failure to provide the necessities of life in the death of Summer.

Guerin testified if she had known Summer had consumed methadone, she would have taken her and her older brother to the hospital.

"We would not be sitting here right now," she said.

Her testimony contradicted that heard yesterday from Amanda MacDonald, a former friend of Guerin's who went with her to Rocky Mountain House on April 29. On Wednesday, MacDonald said she was in the southwest fourplex with the children as Hope and Guerin packed the car when she saw Summer emerge from the master bedroom with a red-orange stain on her shirt and a damp chin.

MacDonald told court Guerin exclaimed, "Oh my God, Jonathan, she just drank your methadone."

But Guerin said she never said such a thing and she didn't see any red stain on her daughter's shirt before she left.

"She had pizza sauce on her mouth, though," she said.

With her testimony, Guerin's defence concluded its evidence.

This afternoon, the court will start to hear final arguments in the case.

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Quotes

- "Treat others as you would want to be treated."
- "Two wrong don't make a right."
- "An eye for an eye... makes the world go blind."
- "People who support the government's tough on crime policies and who say 'lock them up and throw the key away' are narrow-minded idiots."
- "Do to others as you would like to be done to you."
- "Do not do to others what you would not like to be done to you."
- "We are each burdened with prejudice; against the poor or the rich, the smart or the slow, the gaunt or the obese. It is natural to develop prejudices. It is noble to rise above them."
- "Judgments prevent us from seeing the good that lies beyond appearances."
- "Is this in the best interests of society?"
- "Racial superiority is a mere pigment of the imagination."
- "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. In order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently."
- "Poverty is the mother of crime."
- "Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime, as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty."
- "Capital punishment turns the state into a murderer."
- "Rather let the crime of the guilty go unpunished than condemn the innocent."
- "Having your fate rest in the hands of a jury is the same as entrusting yourself to surgery with a mentally retarded doctor."
- "Every crime is born of necessity. If you want less crime, you must change the conditions. Poverty makes crime. Want, rags, crusts, misfortune - all these awake the wild beast in man, and finally he takes, and takes contrary to law, and becomes a criminal. And what do you do with him? You punish him. Why not punish a man for having consumption? The time will come when you will see that that is just as logical. What do you do with the criminal? You send him to the penitentiary. Is he made better? Worse. The first thing you do is to try to trample out his manhood, by putting an indignity upon him. You mark him. You put him in stripes. At night you put him in darkness. His feeling for revenge grows. You make a wild beast of him, and he comes out of that place branded in body and soul, and then you won't let him reform if he wants to."
- "It is better that ten guilty escape, than one innocent suffer."
- "One wrong does not justify another."
- "A jury consists of 12 persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer."
- "When you go into court, you are putting your fate in the hands of 12 people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty."
- "Ending racial discrimination in jury selection can be accomplished only by eliminating peremptory challenges entirely."
- The most glaring weakness is that no matter how efficient and fair the death penalty may seem in theory, in actual practice, it is primarily inflicted upon the weak, the poor, the ignorant and minorities.
- Capital punishment is the most premeditated of all murders.
- Society prepares the crime, the criminals commit it.
- In some ways, I think of incarceration as a lazy response to poverty. It's a way of not dealing with poverty, it's a benign neglect.
- If locking up those who violate the law contributed to safer societies, then the US should be the safest country in the world. In fact, the US affords a glaring example of the limited impact that criminal justice responses may have on crime.
- Politicians are telling people that the way to prevent crime is put ppl in prisons for longer periods in more brutalized conditions. If that were true, America would be the safest place in the world.

- Criminal Justice and Sociology Student
- Liberal Party of Canada
- Advocate for prison and criminal justice reform
- Against criminal justice system discrimination
- Believe "tough on crime" policies are ineffective and are not based on research.
- We need to get smart on the causes of crime and address underlying factors contributing to crime.
- Society needs to shift from retributive justice and punishment to restorative and rehabilitative justice
- Supporter of community based sanctions, treatment, counseling, prison alternatives, restorative justice, and crime prevention programs.
- Justice does not mean punishment as punishment is unequal. Justice should be served with society's best interests in mind and victims and offenders should have their needs met and play a role in the process of healing and restoration.
- We need to rely less on prison as a sentence and more on the alternative and least restrictive options to help reduce overcrowding and unnecessary incarceration.
- We need to improve prison conditions and make less deprivations and only imprison the most dangerous offenders, not minor, first time, drug, property and non violent offenders or those with mental illnesses and substance abuse issues.
- Our prison system needs to place greater emphasis on rehabilitation and reform.

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Friday, March 12, 2010

Mother tells trial she didn't know toddler drank fatal dose of methadone

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