News

BATTLEFORD, SASK., Nov 27 (LSN) – Yesterday, Alberta Report magazine revealed some strange, heretofore- unreported news involving Robert Latimer and his trial for the “mercy-killing” of his 12-year-old daughter Tracy. Amazingly, the media and crown prosecutors have ignored Latimer’s 1974 trial in the forcible rape of a 15-year-old girl. Further, the same judge, Justice E.D. Bayda, who presided over the rape trial 21 years before, was one of the three appellant judges in Latimer’s appeal in his 1995 conviction of second- degree murder. After rejecting his appeal in 1995, along with the other two justices, Justice Bayda dissented on the punishment for Latimer saying that the minimum ten year sentence was too long and recommended a “constitutional exemption.”

In May of 1974, a jury in Battleford Saskatchewan found Latimer and another man guilty in the rape of a 15-year-old girl in the nearby town of Wilke on Sept. 8, 1973. Latimer’s rape case was thrown out on a technicality, in that the trial judge, Justice Bayda, was found to have hurried the jury’s deliberations and not allowed sufficient examination of the girl’s previous sexual history. Unbelievably, the same Justice Bayda, wrote in 1995 about Latimer calling him the “typical salt of the earth…a devoted family man.” who “has no criminal record. He poses no risk to society and requires no rehabilitation.” Following the new 1997 verdict, Justice Bayda reiterated the opinion he expressed after the first trial, that a 10- year sentence for Tracy’s murder was “unjust and unusual punishment.”