Appeal dismissed in honour killings
The Supreme Court of Canada has dismissed an appeal lodged by Hamed Shafia in the “honour killings” of his three sisters and stepmother, the high court ruled in a decision published Thursday.
Hamed Shafia, his father Mohammad Shafia, and his mother, Tooba Yahya, each lost an appeal after the Ontario Court of Appeal unanimously rejected their arguments in a November 2016 ruling.
Shafia, through the Toronto law firm Henein Hutchison LLP, filed an application for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court on Jan. 6, asking for a new trial and arguing the court applied the wrong test for admitting new evidence when it rejected documentation Shafia claims would prove he was a young offender at the time of the killings and should not have been tried as an adult.
The three family members were convicted of four counts of first-degree murder in January 2012 for the killings that a trial judge described as a “twisted concept of honour.”
In June 2009, the couple’s three teenage daughters and Mohammad’s first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, were found drowned at the bottom of the Rideau River in Kingston, Ont.
In his argument to the Ontario Court of Appeal, Hamed introduced birth documents from the Afghanistan government he said showed he should not have been tried as an adult because he was 17 — not 18 — at the time of their deaths. He argued he should have been tried separately from his parents.
The appeal court didn’t admit the evidence to support the claim. The Supreme Court dismissed his most recent appeal.