Was the bathtub girl’s murderer admitted to the practice of law?
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It really sounds like one of the infamous Bathtub Girls wants to work as a lawyer – and leave the murderous matricide behind her.
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Should her case be cleared even though she and her older sister drugged and drowned their alcoholic mother so many years ago in order to get the insurance money?
A Brampton judge – the same one who sentenced the Mississauga teenagers in 2005 – said, of course, that was the point of the Youth Criminal Justice Act. And he rebuked the Law Society of Ontario (LSO) for wanting to use the woman’s youth record to determine whether she is a person a person of lacking good character who should be excluded from practicing law in the province.
“Effective rehabilitation and reintegration requires giving young people the opportunity to move on with their lives and leave their contact with the criminal justice system behind so that a young offender can enter adult life without the stigma of juvenile offending,” said Ontario Judge Bruce Duncan.
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The Bar Association said it is currently reviewing the decision.
The story, first reported by stardoes not identify the aspiring lawyer as one of the killers referred to as the bathtub girls – but the details seem to fit. In 2018 Sun reported that the younger sister, then 30 years old, was working as a trainee for a criminal defence lawyer in Toronto and was awaiting a hearing to determine her “good character” before she could be admitted to the bar.
“She has a unique perspective and insights that will help her become a very Good Lawyer,‘ her mentor said at the time, insisting that she deserved a second chance.
“While many people would go in a different direction and fall into despair, she completed her law studies.”
She would be about 36 now. Should the past be the past?
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More than two decades ago, on January 18, 2003, after months of careful planning and excited online discussion of their plan with friends, the sisters – then 16 and 15 – doused their mother with vodka and administered codeine-laced Paracetamol 3. While their 43-year-old mother lay sleepily in the bathtub, the older girl put on gloves and carefully – avoid telltale bruises – held her underwater for four minutes until she stopped twitching.
They almost got away with murder. But with $133,000 in insurance, the sisters couldn’t stop talking about their crimes. A year after their mother’s death was ruled an accident, one of their friends with a conscience went to the Peel police. With the help of a Sting video, the girls were finally arrested.
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“The defendants intended perfect crimebut they created the perfect law enforcement,Duncan said at her sentencing in 2005.
Both were sentenced to the maximum penalty of ten years in youth custody – six of them in preventive detention and four years under probation supervision.
However, they served much less time – the older sister was released on parole after three years and the younger after four years. By 2011, their goal was to study law.
According to the verdict, the law graduate from Ontario identified only as AB applied for admission to the Law Society as a solicitor in 2016 and in response to a question on the form, she disclosed her murder conviction as a juvenile. This resulted in a referral to a “good character” hearing and she agreed to allow the LSO to access her records.
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She would soon regret it.
She complained that the LSO had used the information against her and revealed her identity and conviction to witnesses. She went to Duncan – the same Brampton judge who convicted and sentenced the Bathtub Girls – and asked that she be stripped of access to her juvenile record.
The judge went even further and ruled that the bar association had no right to consider her past at all. According to the YCJA, her conviction was “expunged” after she served her entire sentence.
“It is conclusively assumed that AB never committed the crime,” he wrote.
And as if by magic, the murderer who cold-bloodedly planned the death of her own mother is no longer a murderer.
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