Man who entombed wife given extra time
Alberta’s top court has added three years to the sentence of a Calgary man who killed his wife and entombed her body in concrete in their basement.
A three-member Alberta Court of Appeal on Thursday increased the manslaughter sentence of Allan Shyback from five years to seven years for the October 2012 strangulation of Lisa Mitchell.
The appeal judges also said the two-year sentence Shyback was handed for committing an indignity to a body was inadequate, increasing that term to three years.
The appeal court stopped short of the overall 12- to 15-year sentence Crown prosecutor Sarah Clive said was appropriate for Shyback’s crime. But the appeal judges agreed the seven-year term handed Shyback by Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Rosemary Nation on Sept. 20, 2017, was too light.
They ruled Nation did not properly categorize the seriousness of Shyback’s crime in the overall scale of manslaughter crimes.
The appeal court noted Shyback admitted choking Mitchell long after her body went limp and she stopped breathing.
“The ultimate sentence of five years (for the manslaughter conviction) was demonstrably unfit having regard to the gravity of the offence and the degree of responsibility of the respondent,” they wrote, in accepting the Crown’s sentencing appeal.
They said that, even though Mitchell’s thyroid cartilage could have been fractured the moment Shyback started choking her, sealing her death, his conduct in continuing the assault made his crime more serious.
“What is clear is that the respondent continued to apply pressure to the victim’s neck after she stopped struggling, after she lost consciousness and after she stopped breathing, until ‘she was gone,’” the appeal judges said.
“Even if the victim died at the first moment of choking, that did not end the unlawful act. The respondent could not have known whether or not, at that point, her thyroid cartilage was displaced.
“He continued to choke her on the basis that she was still alive beyond the point where he himself realized ‘it was too far.’”The appeal judges also said a harsher sentence was needed for interfering with Mitchell’s body.
“The entombment of the body in concrete after packing it with Kitty Litter and salt was aggravating,” they wrote.
“While not a case of dismemberment, this is also not a case where the remains were simply abandoned or casually disposed of.”
Shyback was initially charged with second-degree murder, but Nation ruled he was acting in selfdefence but used excessive force when Mitchell menaced him with a knife and he choked her after he was able to make her drop the weapon.