No jail for mom who put baby’s body in trash bin

Amherstburg woman gets probation, lamenting ‘biggest regret of my life’

From the first words of the sentencing decision until he finished, the judge never lost focus on the infant boy found lifeless in a downtown London dumpster. “The protection of children is a sacred responsibility of our courts,” said Superior Court Justice Duncan Grace at the hearing for Samantha Richards.

But the infant boy tossed away two years ago, the son of the 25-year-old Amherstburg woman, wasn’t protected at all. No one knew about him when he was still in her womb. No one would have found out about him if his tiny body hadn’t been discovered while a man was searching for recyclables on Richmond Row.

And no one, Grace said, should look at how Richards was sentenced Wednesday and think it’s fine to throw a child away like garbage.

It’s why Grace decided that Richards, by all accounts a shattered woman trying to cope with what she’s done, shouldn’t walk away from the London courthouse without a criminal record. Richards, who pleaded guilty earlier this year to concealing the body of a child, was granted a suspended sentence with two years of probation, with a condition she continue with counselling and treatment.

It is an incredibly rare conviction with less that 10 cases on the books for the judge to rely on. Grace’s decision had to weigh Richards’ interests versus the community ’s. Richards quietly sobbed and wiped away tears at the defence table. The judge, reflecting on society’s collective horror about what happened to the baby, sided with the Crown and dismissed the conditional discharge suggested by the defence.

“In my view, a conditional discharge is too lenient a disposition,” Grace said. “It is contrary to the public interest. It would bring the administration of justice into disrepute.”

From the moment the body was discovered on June 15, 2016, there was, as Grace so aptly described, “an immediate, palpable and profound sense of outrage in the community and urgent need to understand what and how it happened.” Surveillance video led the police to Richards, who was living on Ann Street, close to the Richmond Row buildings.

She had given birth to the boy in the bathroom of the apartment — a full-term or near-term, viable sixpound infant.

The agreed statement of facts read when Richards pleaded guilty said the baby died during or shortly after childbirth. The pathologist who did the autopsy on the body said the cause of death was “unacertained.”

The body was put in a reusable grocery bag and hidden in a below-grade grate at the front of her building. Two days later, she took it to the dumpster.

Richards, Grace said, comes from a tight-knit family, though estranged from her father since she was 10, and was an athlete and honour student in high school. She started post-secondary studies in London, but returned to Windsor after a year to take a business and finance program. With a semester to go, she moved back to London to work for the summer.

But she couldn’t cope with what happened in September 2015. In her pre-sentence report, she wrote that she suppressed it, wouldn’t allow herself to think about it and tried to move on.

She couldn’t accept that she was pregnant. She never sought any pre-natal care or told anyone. “I think I knew if I accepted that I was pregnant, I had to accept what happened in September, I had to accept what happened with my dad and I couldn’t.” Richards is “a shell of what existed before,” Grace noted. She’s reclusive, she’s lost friendships and she suffers panic attacks. For her pre-sentence report, she wrote most of her answers because it was too difficult to say what happened.

“Nothing that happened to me will ever make what I did OK,” she wrote. “I was supposed to protect him. I was weak and selfish. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forgive myself for what I did.

“It will always be the biggest regret of my life.”

Those deep regrets were important to remember, Grace said, but so was the child.

“Ms. Richards knew she was pregnant. We now know that the pregnancy was unwanted and the product of circumstances that were deeply upsetting to the defendant,” he said. “Clearly, she was wrestling with deep-rooted and underlying emotional and psychological issues. Those are important facts. “However, there was another life at stake.”

Given that Richards kept the pregnancy secret, never went to a doctor and planned to deliver the child by herself, “it is no surprise that things did not end well.” Grace said he supported Richards for accepting responsibility and “genuinely hopes that she will forgive herself one day,” but this was a serious crime. Outside of court, Richards’ defence lawyer Patricia Brown said “it’s been a very stressful time” for Richards and called it a “tragic case.”

The suspended sentence means Richards has a conviction registered and a criminal record. She can’t apply for a pardon until five years after she successfully completes the two years of probation. “We all hope for the best for Ms. Richards. We hope she will be able to move past this,” Brown said. “We all hope that she can forgive herself and move forward and healing.”