Opposing Robert Latimer’s "I Did the Right Thing" Defense

Robert Latimer, who murdered his daughter Traci because she had cerebral palsy, is out on parole (alas) and vowing to clear his name. Polls in Canada show much sympathy for him. But Tom Oleson, has Latimer’s number in this column published in the Winnipeg Free Press:

Robert Latimer has a problem with the truth. He has a problem telling it, a problem grasping it and a problem understanding it. When he murdered his 12-year-old daughter Tracy in 1993, Latimer initially lied to the police about it, saying that she died in her sleep, in her bed. In truth he carried the girl out of the house, placed her in his pickup truck, ran a hose from the exhaust pipe and filled the cab with poisonous gas until she was asphyxiated.

Then he carried her back in the house and put her in her bed. It was only when an autopsy revealed that she had been murdered in this cold and calculated fashion that he confessed.

So? He was motivated by compassion, and in our unprincipled time, compassion justifies all evils.

Latimer sure thinks so. He wants a new trial with a jury to decide not whether he murdered his daughter but whether he was right to do so. Oleson isn’t buying:

I don’t think I’m hysterical, but I do know what I and many other Canadians — particularly disabled Canadians — are afraid of. We’re afraid of Robert Latimer and people like him who think that they have the right and should have the authority to judge the quality of our lives and to decide whether those lives should continue, as Latimer did with his daughter.

The Latimer case is a warning: Millions of Canadians support a man who murdered his child because she was disabled. I can’t say the same attitudes would not be expressed widely here in the USA. We are well on the way of recreating the “useless eater” category of human life. Oleson understands:

...[T]he day that Canadians come to consider it as the “right” thing to do, as Latimer asks us to, will not only be a dark day for Canadians who are disabled, but an even darker one for those who are not.