No more jail time for woman who stored infant bodies in storage unit: Defence
WINNIPEG — A lawyer representing a women convicted of concealing the bodies of six infants in a rented Winnipeg storage locker says she should be spared more jail time.
Greg Brodsky told Andrea Giesbrecht’s sentencing hearing that the 43-year-old has already spent 168 days in custody following her arrest in 2014.
He says the court should remember Giesbrecht is being sentenced only on concealing the remains and not on anything to do with how the infants died.
Brodsky is asking for a sentence of time already served while the Crown wants an 11-year sentence with credit for time served.
Crown attorney Debbie Buors says no dignity was given to the fetuses once they were brought into the world and Giesbrecht has not shown any remorse for her actions.
Brodsky says Giesbrecht is not required to explain what happened.
“She doesn’t have to testify,” he told court Friday. “She doesn’t have to provide an explanation.”
Giesbrecht was arrested in October 2014 after she defaulted on paying rent for the storage locker. Staff, who were to auction off the locker’s contents, opened a plastic bin, noticed a strange smell and called police.
Medical experts testified the infants were Giesbrecht’s, were at or near full-term, and were likely to have been born alive.
But because the remains were badly decomposed, it was impossible to determine how the infants died.
Buors told court that Giesbrecht carefully hid all six pregnancies, placed the remains in bags and plastic containers and carried them to a U-haul storage locker.
“There was no dignity given to those individuals, those fetuses,” Buors said. “There has been no remorse shown by Andrea Giesbrecht.”
Giesbrecht’smotiveremainsamystery. She did not testify at her trial, where she was convicted earlier this year of six counts of concealing the dead body of a child, and the defence did not call any witnesses.
Brodsky disputed the idea that the infants were born alive and said Giesbrecht was storing the remains in order to save them.
But the judge rejected that assertion, noting that Giesbrecht went to great lengths to hide her pregnancies from her family and others, and knew about being pregnant and delivering babies. She had her two children in hospital. She also had 10 legal abortions.
Buors said there is nothing in Giesbrecht’s past to explain her actions.
“She had a very normal upbringing. There was no history of abuse.”
Giesbrecht also has no addiction issues other than a gambling problem related to an earlier fraud conviction, Buors added. She violated a probation order from that conviction by going to a casino in 2014.
Buors asked the court for a oneyear sentence on the first concealment count and consecutive twoyear sentences — the maximum for the offence — on each of the other five. Giesbrecht would get just over nine months’ credit for time served between her arrest and when she was released on bail.
Brodsky challenged the need for consecutive sentences saying the conviction was for concealing remains in the storage locker between March and Oct. 2014. “This is one incident,” he said. Provincial court Judge Murray Thompson has agreed to a media request to live-stream his decision on sentencing but is expected to hand down a sentence at a later date.