CAEFS has grappled with the concerns expressed by advocates from within the community of women with disabilities that the lives of those who experience disabilities will be further devalued by the removal of the mandatory minimum sentence for murder. Given the social construction of disability and the total failure of social welfare systems to provide adequately for families who care for individuals with disabilities, dominant accounts of compassion will sympathize with the parent or caregiver who allegedly kills to alleviate suffering. The legal and public reaction to the Latimer (1997) case provides an illustration of this pattern.

The experience of women’s groups and others representing equality interests reveals that most criminal law reforms operate to further reinforce patterns of dominance and subordination. Federal leadership and responsibility is required to confront and restrain systemic discrimination in judicial practices and to anticipate the outcome of new reforms. Legal mechanisms must be devised in order to redress race, sex, class, disability, and sexual orientation discrimination in all aspects of the criminal process. In particular, s. 15 of the Charter must be used as a measure by which sentencing laws and practices can be challenged and changed.

Section 15 of the Charter must be implemented at the sentencing stage such that, if there were no mandatory minimum sentence, the act of someone like Latimer would not deserve mitigation on the basis of either his hardship or a suggestion that his child’s life was not worth living. Such an argument in mitigation clearly violates the letter and spirit of s. 15 of the Charter. CAEFS argues that it is this label of murder, more than the actual sentence, that will have the greater educative value for the broader community. The risk of retaining the mandatory sentence of life imprisonment is that the notoriety of a case like Latimer may move jurors to avoid the murder label altogether by refusing to enter a conviction for murder in cases involving victims with disabilities.