Latimer still hoping to clear his name
Prison didn’t convince Latimer that killing his daughter was wrong
The man framed in the farmhouse door extends his hand and introduces himself as Bob.
Leaning back in a chair at the kitchen table, he says this year’s harvest was OK — a decent crop of wheat, but the peas and the canola could have been better.
Outside, smoke-grey clouds hang low over the stubble fields stretching to the horizon. A barn cat scampers across the gravel driveway and into the row of trees separating the farmhouse from the rest of the world.
Bob makes small talk for a few minutes. It’s not until he reaches for a cardboard box filled with letters and legal documents that he emerges as the Robert Latimer whose decision to end his disabled daughter’s life 24 years ago sparked a national debate on murder, euthanasia and justice.
Latimer has maintained a much more private life since his release from prison after serving 10 years of a life sentence for killing 12-year-old Tracy, who suffered from severe cerebral palsy, seizures and, he insists, unrelenting pain.
Although strangers occasionally recognize him when he travels to nearby Battleford, what Latimer calls “the circus” is long over. He rarely gives interviews and seems content to spend his time on the family farm north of Wilkie. But his silence is anything but an admission of guilt or contrition.
“What I did was right, and the government and the authorities can’t understand that. Or the fact that what they’ve done is wrong — they can’t understand that,” he said.
“How that leads to me being regretful, I don’t see it. You can only do what you can do. You have to know what’s right and what’s wrong, and right now I believe that it’s the government that should have the regrets.”
Reaching across the table, he produces a bound volume containing almost 300 pages of letters, articles and court decisions. The first were handwritten in early 2001, after he entered prison. The most recent, addressed to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, are just over a year old.
Latimer speaks softly but hardens when the conversation shifts to Tracy, his long legal battle and the decade he spent in prison. His speech is peppered with phrases pulled from his letters: “fraudulent fabrications,” “sadistic old judges,” every kind of “deceit.”
“Does it make me angry?” the 64-year-old farmer said of his sentence and 16-year campaign to clear his name. “Of course it’s anger, but just like any powerful force that’s wrong you can’t sit there and beat your head against the wall. You have to try and correct it.”
Latimer ceased to be the farmer known to his friends as Bob, who was unknown pretty much everywhere else, on Oct. 24, 1993. That’s the day he placed Tracy into his pickup truck, ran a hose from the exhaust pipe into the cab and switched on the engine. She died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Tracy had the mental capacity of an infant. She suffered daily seizures and was, according to court documents, thought to be in a great deal of pain. Doctors had performed painful surgeries to correct her scoliosis; another, to ameliorate a dislocated hip, was on the horizon.
Eventually, the Supreme Court of Canada said in its decision, “Robert Latimer formed the view that his daughter’s life was not worth living.”
Latimer’s first conviction was thrown out amid allegations of jury tampering. In 1997 he was again convicted of second-degree murder. Saskatchewan’s appeals court reduced his sentence, but the Supreme Court upheld it. Eight years after Tracy’s death, Latimer went to prison.
The case generated national attention as it plodded through the courts. Some insisted Latimer’s only motivation was to alleviate Tracy’s pain and that he was anything but a murderer, while others argued that leniency would set a dangerous precedent.
You have to know what’s right and what’s wrong, and ... I believe that it’s the government that should have the regrets.
Allan Blakeney, who was then premier of Saskatchewan, delivered to the solicitor general a petition asking for clemency. It had been signed by more than 60,000 people. More than 150 people volunteered to serve some of his prison time, so he could go home early.
Those requests were refused, and Latimer served the minimum 10 years after he was denied early parole for refusing to admit it was wrong to end Tracy’s life.
While he is broadly contemptuous of the justice system, Latimer seems little interested in his status as a polarizing figure: a martyr for those convinced that a life filled with pain is not worth living, and the manifestation of many disabled rights activists’ worst fears.
“I guess in reality all the legal crap is secondary to the initial circumstances of our daughter,” he said. “She’d had enough. We weren’t about to carry on and start cutting off pieces (of her) and throwing (them) away, which the courts basically were obligating us to do.”
Latimer’s continued focus on his daughter is the motivation behind his letter-writing campaign, a years-long demand for more information about what the Supreme Court called in its decision a “more effective pain medication” that would have improved her quality of life. The court contended that the Latimer family could have relied on a feeding tube and the medication, which it does not name, but he believes that was never an option because stronger drugs would have further compromised her “already challenged” ability to breathe independently.
“I mean, it’s a convenient element of their attack on us. They say that there were options and I want to know what they were,” he said, adding that modern medicine has only become better at keeping people alive simply so they can experience more pain.
In 2011, Latimer told a CBC reporter that his only regret was not being able to spend more time with his three other children.
Asked if that is still the case, for the first and only time in an hourlong interview, he choked back tears.
“They deserve much better than what they’ve gotten,” he said.
However, Latimer refuses to put the 24-year saga that defined his life in the past.
He said the Trudeau government may be his best chance to have his name cleared. But if that doesn’t happen, he will never escape the parole officers who check up on him every few months, and he may never escape his anger at a system he believes failed him when it mattered most.
“It’s still there. It’s not a daily driver or anything like that. Yeah, you can be free of it. You don’t have to dwell on it all the time. But you can’t let them forget either, when they’re being so deceitful.”