The Baby Shaking Adulterer

Recently, a Toronto man was given an 18 month sentence for shaking a baby in a parking lot.  According to his account, the seven month old baby was crying while he was on the phone with his common-law spouse, and he was concerned the spouse would hear the child.  The infant was the daughter of his girlfriend (but apparently not his child) who was in a store purchasing him a tape measure.

To recap: while his girlfriend went into a store to buy something for him, he violently shook her baby to conceal their affair from his spouse.

According to Superior Court Justice Janet Wilson,

"This was a single incident of loss of control. There is no pattern of abuse."

How comforting, then, that he only got 18 months for shaking a baby unconscious.  A child who now (more than two years later) is on the low end of the developmental scale.  It wasn't a pattern of abuse, just a loss of control with an infant.

I have ranted about the lack of sufficient punishment in the Canadian judicial system in this space before, and I will continue to do so until the punishments handed down by the Canadian courts fit the crimes.

Without even considering capital punishment (and without getting into a long diatribe about it, I am grateful for its absence from our laws), in many ways our system is too soft.  A grown man, regardless of whether it is a pattern of abuse or a one-time event, knows that shaking a baby is wrong.  He knows that it can hurt the baby.  And in this case, the man wasn't overtired, or frustrated, or some other "parental" excuse that is usually given to excuse such deplorable behaviour.  He was doing something so unbelievably selfish.

And he still only got 18 months.

Comments

[nomotherearth]

And with good behaviour - will it even be 18 mths?? This disgusts me. The punishment should fit the crime - they should have, at the very least, taken into account the circumstances and upped the sentence

[motherbumper]

So let me get this straight - 18 months for (according the fact as I understand them) creating potentially major obstacles in this child's future - I can't even write down how angry this make me. Sad and angry. Keep these stories alive SciFi Dad - they need a voice.

[gabriella]

just disgusting.