On April 10, 2014 Huffington Post ran an article summarizing the guilty verdict handed down by a Vancouver court to child killer Sarah Leung. The former mother had twice placed her newborn in a plastic bag and left it out with the trash. Only one of the dead infant’s bodies was found.
The article itself opens with the following:
A Vancouver jury has convicted a 28-year-old woman of two counts of infanticide in the separate deaths of her two newborn sons, finding her guilty of a lesser crime than second-degree murder.
The jury returned with the verdicts for Sarah Leung on Thursday night, concluding six days of deliberations following a trial that began in February.
Leung’s lawyer, Richard Fowler, said Friday the case remains an “abject tragedy” but that the jury came back with the right decision.
“I think personally it’s an example of our justice system at its absolute best,” he said in an interview.
If this is our justice system at its best, we are all in fucking trouble.
If Sarah Leung’s infants had been killed by a man, say, for example, the father – would the charge have been infanticide? Or would it have been the far more serious crime of murder?
You, reading this article, should know the answer. I don’t even need to state it here.
So what the fuck is infanticide?
It’s a lesser criminal offence, introduced in Canada in 1948 as alternative to what previously would be categorized as murder. However, prior to the introduction of the statute, Canadian juries often found women not guilty even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
Infanticide was a legal innovation allowing juries to produce a guilty verdict where they would have previously refused, because the murderers were female.
Juries, whether Canadian or otherwise, have never had any difficulty convicting men who kill infants. In the modern social context, wherein a newborn doesn’t threaten the family, mother, or tribe by draining scarce resources, murdering an infant is abominable.
So why does infanticide exist? Why are women given the unique privilege of killing their babies with a legal escape hatch from criminal responsibility?
Either women are inferior, less capable than male adult people and the law recognizes this as fact, or women are socially superior, of a higher caste, held exempt from the laws against murder which govern other, less privileged groups.
Possibly, in a slightly variant version of the first narrative, inferiority and imbecility is fabricated and maintained by women in order to accomplish the second scenario – a supreme social caste positioned above the law.
Manslaughter is also a lesser offence than murder. In Canada it carries a minimum sentence of 4 years in prison, and a maximum life sentence. The premise that the legal system lacked a description for crimes not quite murderous is erroneous. We had that covered.
Unless you’re a woman who murders a baby.
Section 237 of the criminal code of Canada states: “Every female person who commits infanticide is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years.”
Sexually selective justice has no place in any society where men and women are supposedly equal under, and before the law.
