VICTORIA, BC, Fri Feb 18, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Robert Latimer, who was convicted of second-degree murder for killing his disabled daughter Tracy, says he has no regrets about the murder and in retrospect would do it again.
In an interview with Radio-Canada, the CBC’s French language service, Latimer said, “I know I was right,” to kill 12-year-old Tracy, who suffered from cerebral palsy.
According to the CBC, this interview is the first public statement Latimer has made since he was granted full parole on Dec. 8, 2010.
Latimer has never expressed remorse for killing his 12-year-old daughter, and has maintained that he had acted “out of love” and that he had no choice but to kill her.
He told the CBC’s Anne-Marie Dussault that the decision to kill her was hard, “but it was not sad.”
“She’d had enough. That was it. We were done,” Latimer told Dussault.
When Tracy’s death was discovered, Latimer at first lied to police, saying that she had died in her sleep. He later confessed to police, who had done an autopsy, that he had killed his daughter by placing her in the cab of his truck and connecting a hose from the cab to the truck’s exhaust pipe. He also confessed to having considered other methods of killing Tracy, including Valium overdose and “shooting her in the head.”
The National Parole Board noted in its files on a decision to extend Latimer’s day parole in 2009 that “You (Latimer) maintain that you were motivated solely by a desire to end her suffering from severe and chronic pain,” yet “File information indicates that you staged her death.”
“In order to make it appear that your daughter died of natural causes, you removed her body from the vehicle and placed her in her bed, giving the impression to your wife and others that she died in her sleep.”
In the CBC interview Latimer also disparaged the Canadian justice system and advocacy groups for the disabled who agreed with the sentence imposed on him.
“If it’s the right thing, why shouldn’t it be condoned? That’s the very purpose of a jury trial,” he said, adding, “They have to have a judicial process to establish right from wrong. It’s designed to do that, it did not do that in our situation.”
“They’re just a bunch of arrogant, self-righteous, religious-backed people. They don’t care about Tracy,” Latimer said. “They’re just a bunch of sadistic butchers, really. They have to come clean on that. What is the legal alternative that we were supposed to take by law?”
Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition commented to LifeSiteNews that Latimer’s remarks demonstrate “exactly why we need laws that protect people with disabilities.”
“The fact is that this is exactly why we need to maintain laws against euthanasia and assisted suicide in Canada,” Schadenberg said. “Precisely because some people like Robert Latimer view killing a person with a disability as a merciful act.
“This is exactly why we need laws that protect people with disabilities from people like Robert Latimer, who will go ahead and kill a child and think it’s mercy.”
When the CBC interviewer asked Latimer if, considering what he’d gone through since murdering his daughter, he would kill her again, Latimer said “yes.” “People think it’s a hard question, but it’s not.”
Latimer’s parole stipulates that he must continue receiving psychological counseling, that he is “not to have responsibility for, or make decisions for, any individuals who are severely disabled,” and that he is restricted to a 50-mile radius around his residence in Victoria, British Columbia.
Watch the Radio-Canada (French) interview with Robert Latimer here.