Globe and Mail, June 17th;
A mother who pleaded guilty to locking her two adopted sons in cages for 13 years when they were not in school and forcing them to wear diapers as teenagers begged for leniency yesterday.
“Please have mercy on us,” she asked in a letter to the judge who is to sentence her and her husband.
“I’m so very sorry, as is my husband,” says the letter, read out in court by her lawyer, Alexander Sosna.
[…]
The horrors they endured at the couple’s farmhouse in Blackstock, near Port Perry, were uncovered when three family members contacted the children’s aid society. Police and child-welfare workers descended on the family home on June 4, 2001.
They found a 15-year-old boy curled up in a cage fashioned from a baby’s crib. The cage was strapped to the wall and padlocked.
His brother, then 14, walked out from a room that contained a second cage.
The boys told a horrific story of being beaten, forced to sleep in the cages, often given only buttered bread for dinner, of eating their feces to avoid being punished for having an accident and of drinking their urine when deprived of water.
This morning they were sentenced to 9 months. Under Canada’s system, convicted serve no more than two thirds, so they’ll be out in six.
BobTarantino:
Nine months. Lock children in cages, beat them, subject them to anal probes, instill them with such terror that they need to eat their own discharge and the worst that will happen to you is a nine month sentence. Oh, and the judge will admonish you for having “failed” as parents; sort of like not having signed them up for, I don’t know, piano lessons.
That is enough to make my stomach churn and want to scream. How shockingly little regard is given for humanity.
Interestingly enough, I adopted a kitty from the SPCA recently. I am on probation for 6 months (until the middle of August to be exact).
Quite a statement on our priorities. 6 months sentence for unimaginable cruelty to another human… 6 months probation for someone who wants to adopt a kitten. Is it just me, or is this equation unbalanced?
God bless those children in the article.
I can’t believe the judge would be so lenient as to only give those bastards 9 months – it’s unthinkable that such long-term abuse of children (or anyone frm that matter) could be punishable by a mere slap on the wrist.