Woman gets 7 years for killing her friend
44-year-old gets seven years for fatal stabbing fuelled by drug, alcohol binge
When it came time to read her statement to the court, Wanda Ladouceur could barely speak through the tears.
“There's not a day that goes by she's not on my mind,” Ladouceur said of her friend Darlene Cardinal, who she stabbed to death during a drug and alcohol binge two years ago.
“Darlene was a sister to me,” she said. “There's no excuse in the world that can explain my actions.”
Ladouceur, 44, was sentenced to seven years in prison Friday after pleading guilty to manslaughter in the death of her friend.
Both victim and accused were Indigenous women who were uniquely vulnerable due to their personal circumstances and “intergenerational” trauma, court heard.
Ladouceur, her common-law
partner and Cardinal were living in Lac La Biche at the time of Cardinal's death. They had no fixed address, and spent their time bouncing between businesses, a bar and a homeless tent city, according to an agreed statement of facts. Ladouceur told a probation officer she and Cardinal struggled with homelessness and at one point shared a tent in Lac La Biche.
All three had been drinking and using meth on June 22, 2018. Ladouceur also took prescription medications, including a sleep aid and a pain killer. Her partner was arrested for public intoxication and released around 4 a.m.
A little over an hour later, Ladouceur and her companions settled in near the town's old train station, where they continued to drink.
At some point, the women began to argue. Ladouceur knocked Cardinal to the ground, then stabbed her.
Ladouceur and her partner fled. Once on Lac La Biche's main street, they ran into Cardinal's niece, who they told to call an ambulance. The niece went to where Cardinal had been stabbed and found her aunt in a pool of blood.
Ladouceur then went to a convenience store and asked an employee to call 911. An emergency medical services crew eventually arrived but were unable to save Cardinal. She was 43.
Police initially charged Ladouceur with second-degree murder. Since her arrest, she has insisted she was too intoxicated to remember what she did. At one point during Friday's proceedings, she muttered, “I don't remember.”
` SO MUCH MORE THAN A FILE'
Friday's hearing was held by video due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Ladouceur was in the Edmonton Remand Centre, where on Thursday 58 inmates and 20 staff were sick with the virus.
In a statement read by Crown prosecutor Sheila Joyce, Cardinal's family described her as a “strong Aboriginal woman,” a mother of eight from Beaver Lake Cree Nation who “put other people before herself.”
“She was a beautiful soul,” they wrote. “She was so much more than a file that is being read into the court system.”
Joyce and defence lawyer Shawn King made a joint submission recommending Justice Peter Michalyshyn sentence Ladouceur to seven years. They said the sentence had to take into account both the victim and offender's Indigenous backgrounds.
Joyce, who called the case “nothing short of tragic,” noted the homicide rate for Indigenous women is six times the rate for non-indigenous women due to a variety of systemic factors.
King, meanwhile, argued the court needed to take into account “intergenerational” trauma his client experienced, which led her to homelessness, addiction and violence.
A Gladue report, which requires courts to consider alternatives to prison for Indigenous offenders, found at least three of Ladouceur's relatives attended residential schools, including her mother, who “escaped” from a school in St. Paul.
The report found Ladouceur has been homeless for much of her life and suffered abuse both as a child and from intimate partners.
Michalyshyn accepted the sentence, saying “there shouldn't be a question in anyone's mind that there is genuine remorse here on Ms. Ladouceur's part.”
With credit for time in pretrial custody, Ladouceur has just less than four years left to serve.