Challenging Infanticide: Why Section 233 of Canadas Criminal Code is Unconstitutional
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the early twentieth century, Canadian juries were reluctant to convict mothers who had murdered their newly born children (children who are under one year of age) and would acquit them despite their obvious guilt.In 1948, Parliament tried to remedy this by adding s. 233 to the Canadian Criminal Code, creating the offence of infanticide.With a maximum penalty of five years imprisonment, juries would be more willing to convict these mothers.As of this writing, s. 233 is still in force.In this article, I will argue that s. 233 is unconstitutional because it violates the equality rights of newly born children under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.Specifically, I argue that the punishments a society gives for murder reflects the value it places on human life.Section 233's mandatory lesser punishment for mothers who kill (or even premeditatedly murder) their newly born children communicates that they are less worthy as members of Canadian society than those who are at least one year of age.Furthermore, with its low maximum penalty and a broad definition of disturbed mind, s. 233 trivializes the killing of the newly born children.I then argue that these infringements cannot be justified.Lastly, I will outline how to constitutionally challenge the law.In the section about why s. 233 cannot be justified, I will also discuss a possible replacement for s. 233: a defence of diminished responsibility that applies regardless of the gender of the perpetrator or age of the victim.This would allow flexibility * Scott Mair is a Licensed Paralegal with the Law Society of Ontario and has a minor in law from Carleton University.The views expressed in this article are his own and not those of the Law Society of Ontario.in the sentencing of mentally ill but legally sane defendants without discriminating against a newly born child because of his or her age.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.045 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".