At the request of La Maison des Femmes de la Cote-Nord in Baie Comeau, LEAF retained a lawyer to monitor the trial of a man, charged with second degree murder, who shot and killed his wife in the battered women’s centre. Early in the trial, the charge was reduced to manslaughter on the grounds the man could not have planned the murder because he was too drunk and depressed.
With the lawyer’s help, the women from the shelter intervened before the judge to voice their concern that the offence was being treated as an isolated event rather than part of a violent pattern of domestic abuse. The judge ordered the accused to serve 14 years in jail.
This was an important precedent since men in the past had received as little as two and a half years for such an offence.