A Voice Unheard: The Latimer Case And People With Disabilities, by Ruth Enns. Fernwood Books Ltd. (P.O Box 406, Stn. C, Toronto, ON M6J 3P5; 416/595-1085, fax 416/595-1140; email: lindsay@istar.ca) $17.95.
Few murder cases "have been so dangerously misleading as the Robert Latimer one," writes Mona Winberg in the Toronto Sun. The case, which went to Canada's Supreme Court in mid-June, is the subject of Ruth Enns' "meticulously researched" A Voice Unheard: The Latimer Case and People with Disabilities.
Enns, herself disabled as the result of polio, "shows how a little-understood disability" -- cerebral palsy -- "plus a biased media that accepted without question virtually everything it was told" led to the skewed facts of the case presented through the national media two years ago (See "Murder of disabled daughter draws 1-year sentence," D.R. Nation, January/February 1998). At no time during either trial were people called to the stand who had disabilities like Tracy's; "thus, the disability voice remained unheard in the case."
The portrait of the Latimer family that Enns paints shows a father so "plagued by his own phobias" that he feared even syringes -- who, it seems, would rather kill his daughter than let her live with a feeding tube.
