Andrea Giesbrecht to appeal sentence for concealing dead babies

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This article was published 06/09/2017 (2964 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Winnipeg mother serving an 8.5-year prison sentence for hiding the bodies of six dead babies in a storage locker intends to appeal her conviction and her prison sentence.

Andrea Giesbrecht, 43, was sentenced in July for six counts of concealing a child’s body after a lengthy and high-profile trial in front of provincial court Judge Murray Thompson. Her notice of appeal takes issue with the judge’s decision in 42 different ways, and one of her main concerns is that she was sentenced for a crime for which she was not charged.

“The learned trial judge erred in making findings that were not in accordance with the counts before the court and in sentencing the accused for actions that were an offence not charged, such as improperly or indecently interfering with (human remains), or infanticide or of failing to properly dispose of a dead body,” states the notice to appeal filed by Giesbrecht’s defence team on Aug. 10.

The charges against Giesbrecht were never upgraded to include homicide offences, and the Crown told court the police investigation was thwarted by how much time had passed before the bodies were discovered in a McPhillips Street U-Haul storage locker in October 2014. The bodies of full and near-full term fetuses were too badly decomposed for medical experts to determine how they died. The judge ruled Giesbrecht would have known the babies would likely be born alive after a medical expert testified the chance of all six being stillborn was one in 500 trillion.

“Giesbrecht concealed each of these six pregnancies, even from her husband. She bagged each of the bodies, sealed them or encased them in cement or powder, all in an effort to contain the smell of human decomposition and decay,” the judge said in his decision.

Defence lawyer Greg Brodsky said after Giesbrecht’s sentence was imposed July 14 that he would recommend she appeal it. Throughout her trial, he maintained “there were no live births” and repeatedly referred to the fetuses as “products of conception” — a point that’s echoed in Giesbrecht’s notice of appeal. It says Thompson “erred in failing to acknowledge a woman can destroy her near term or term fetus and can induce an abortion accordingly and do what she wants with the remains without receiving criminal sanctions, and in failing to acknowledge that the mother should be acquitted if she killed the fetus (child) in the womb and thereby had a self-induced abortion but that allowing the ‘child’ to be delivered in a stillborn state would require her to be imprisoned.”

Brodsky could not be reached for comment Wednesday. Giesbrecht has more than seven years of her sentence left to serve.

There has never been a case in Canadian law involving so many charges of concealing infants’ remains, making Giesbrecht “the worst offender” for this type of charge, Crown prosecutors had argued.

Each count carried a maximum two-year sentence, and the judge decided Giesbrecht’s “extreme” moral culapability would have increased after the first time she disposed of an infant’s body. He sentenced her to six months for the first count, one year for the second, and two years each for the remaining four dead fetuses.

A 9.5-year sentence would have been “crushing” to Giesbrecht because of her family and work involvement, Thompson said, reducing the total sentence to 8.5 years. Giesbrecht also argues the judge erred in only reducing her sentence by one year.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay