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mandel: has bathtub girl killer been cleared to practise law?
now that certainly sounds like one of the notorious bat...
aug 15 2024
3 minute read
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now that certainly sounds like one of the notorious bathtub girls wants to practise as a lawyer — and let those murderous matricide bygones be bygones.
should her slate be wiped clean even though she and her older sister drugged and drowned their alcoholic mother all those years ago to get their hands on the insurance money?
a brampton judge — the same one who sentenced the mississauga teens back in 2005 — said of course, that’s the whole point of the youth criminal justice act. and he scolded the law society of ontario (lso) for wanting to use the woman’s youth record to consider whether she’s a person lacking good character who should be disqualified from the practice of law in the province.
“effective rehabilitation and reintegration require that young persons be given an opportunity to move on with their life and put their interaction with the criminal justice system behind them so that a young offender is able to enter adulthood free of the stigmatization of a youth record,” said ontario justice bruce duncan.
the law society says it’s currently reviewing the decision.
the story, first reported by the star , doesn’t identify the aspiring lawyer as one of the killers dubbed the bathtub girls — but the details certainly seem to fit. in 2018, the sun reported that the younger sister, 30 at the time, was articling for a toronto criminal defence lawyer and awaiting a “good character” hearing before being called to the bar.
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“she has a unique perspective and insights that will carry her down the road to become a very good lawyer, ” her mentor said at the time, insisting she deserves a second chance.
“ while many people would go in a different direction and fall in a well of despair, she has finished law school. ”
she would now be about 36. should the past be the past?
more than two decades ago, on jan. 18, 2003, after months of careful planning and giddily discussing their plot online with friends, the sisters — 16 and 15 at the time — plied their mom with vodka and slipped her tylenol 3s laced with codeine. as their 43-year-old mother lay sleepily in her bath, the older girl put on gloves and gently — to avoid telltale bruising — held her underwater for four minutes until she stopped twitching.
two sisters, who cannot be identified, leave brampton court where they were on trial for first-degree murder in the drowning of their mother in a bathtub when they were 15 and 16. michael peake/toronto sun file
michael peake
/
toronto sun file
they nearly got away with murder. but flush with $133,000 in insurance money, the sisters couldn’t stop blabbing about what they’d done. a year after their mom’s death was ruled an accident, one of their friends with a conscience went to peel police. with the help of a sting video, the girls were finally under arrest.
“ the defendants set out to commit the perfect crime, but instead they created the perfect prosecution, ” duncan said in convicting them in 2005.
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both were sentenced to the maximum youth term of 10 years — six in secure custody and four while supervised in the community.
but they did much less time than that — the older sister was paroled after three years and the younger one, after four. as far back as 2011, her ambition was to go to law school.
according to the ruling, the ontario law grad identified only as ab applied for admission to the law society as a lawyer in 2016 and in response to a question on the form, disclosed her murder conviction as a youth. that triggered a referral to a “good character” hearing and she agreed the lso could access her records.
she’d soon learn to regret it.
she complained the lso used the information against her, revealing her identity and conviction to witnesses. she went before duncan — the same brampton judge who’d convicted and sentenced the bathtub girls — and asked to rescind access to her youth record.
the judge went further, finding the law society has no business even considering her past — according to the ycja, after serving her complete sentence, her conviction has been “erased.”
“ab is conclusively deemed never to have committed the offence,” he wrote.
and like magic, a killer who coldly plotted her own mother’s death is a killer no more.
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