KIRK MAKIN
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
It was a parent's worst nightmare - a baby plucked from its mother's hospital room by a stranger within hours of being born.
A year after the abduction horrified the country and caused police to lock down the city of Sudbury, the abductor, Brenda Batisse, has asked the Ontario Court of Appeal to eliminate her five-year prison sentence on account of her horrendous personal background.
Defence counsel Frank Addario told the court yesterday that, while in an unbalanced state, Ms. Batisse plotted the abduction to covertly "replace" a baby she had miscarried.
He said Ms. Batisse, now 30, feared that her boyfriend would leave her if he discovered she had lost their baby.
"There was a certain craziness to the offence," he said. "It was the kind of offence that we could consider the result of a chaotic and abusive childhood, atrocious relationships with men, and a beating that caused the loss of her third child."
He asked the judges to show that the courts are serious about crafting enlightened sentences for aboriginal offenders: "She wouldn't have been before the courts but for her experiences both as a woman, and as an aboriginal woman."
Mr. Addario described his client as an emotionally needy woman who had been sexually and psychologically abused throughout her life. He asked the judges to replace her "harsh, unfit" penitentiary sentence with a conditional sentence, allowing Ms. Batisse to pursue healing and rehabilitation among her own people.
However, Crown counsel Karen Shai argued that Ms. Batisse's trial judge rightly registered society's denunciation of the offence by imposing a sharp, but not overwhelming, prison sentence.
"To imagine oneself being the victim's mother for a brief moment - as she looks out the window and sees people searching dumpsters for her newborn - is to imagine the unimaginable," Ms. Shai said.
She said the crime convulsed the community with shock and fear for the baby's safety, and warrants tough treatment regardless of the racial origin of the perpetrator.
"Speaking only for myself, I find it hard to see how you could overemphasize denunciation," said Madam Justice Eileen Gillese. "This kind of offence is so horrific."
Disguised as an orderly, Ms. Batisse spent several hours in
Police used video-camera images to identify Ms. Batisse and recover the child at her home a few hours later.
Mr. Addario said the courts have committed themselves to decreasing extremely high aboriginal prison populations by reducing sentences and making better use of rehabilitation.
He said there could be few more worthy recipients of this consideration than a woman who was sexually assaulted throughout her youth and beaten by her boyfriends.
"She developed a view of the world as a hostile place which caused her to develop skills such as lying and manipulation in order to survive," he said in a written brief.