Brenda Batisse, the northern Ontario woman who pleaded guilty to kidnapping a newborn baby from a Sudbury-area hospital, was sentenced to five years in jail on Wednesday.
The 29-year-old woman, who pleaded guilty to charges of abduction and endangering the life of an infant, was said to be shocked at the sentence, according to reporters inside the courthouse.
The defence had asked that the woman be sentenced to two years of house arrest and community service instead of jail. The prosecution pushed for a jail sentence.
"It was a very tough decision to make knowing that she had such a terrible life and balance (that) against the concerns of the community and the taking of a child from a public hospital," Crown attorney Len Walker told reporters Wednesday. "The case law supports the position that the judge took and I agree with him."
Defence lawyer Berk Keaney said he plans on appealing the sentencing.
"The ultimate sentence doesn't reflect contemporary legal precedent . . . with respect to sentencing first offenders," he told CTV Sudbury.
Judge Robbie Gordon rendered his sentence Wednesday afternoon days after the court heard of the woman's desperate childhood, marred with tales of sexual abuse and neglect.
Batisse, who is a mother to two young girls, is said to suffer from serious depression because of the abuse.
The sentence
However, when the judge delivered his ruling, he noted the seriousness of the crime and the vulnerability of the victim as reasons for sending Batisse to jail. He also said the crime was predetermined and carefully planned.
"There are few crimes the public treat as more serious," Gordon said when handing down the sentence. "Imagine the start horror the parents must have felt watching the police search dumpsters outside of the hospital."
"People were very upset. The public hates randomness," Walker said. "The public is very upset when things happen and individuals think 'that could have happened to me.'"
Batisse was caught on a hospital video surveillance camera escaping Sudbury Regional Hospital with a baby in her arms around the noon hour on Nov. 1, 2007. The baby was just hours-old.
The woman dressed up in hospital scrubs and went into the new mother's room, telling her the baby had to be weighed.
Batisse changed the baby girl into boy's clothing and removed a hospital identification bracelet before driving the child to her home in Kirkland Lake, Ont. Court heard she told her live-in boyfriend that she had been pregnant with a son.
Earlier in the year, Batisse had become pregnant with her boyfriend's baby and an ultrasound revealed it was a boy. However, court heard that she was viciously attacked and as a result, miscarried the baby two months before the kidnapping.
She didn't tell her boyfriend and led him to believe she was still pregnant. Her lawyers noted her relationship with her boyfriend was the first healthy relationship Batisse had ever had.
Police found the baby girl about eight hours later inside Batisse's home. She was unharmed.
On June 12, during the end of sentencing submissions, Batisse told the judge she was no longer the same woman on the surveillance video.
She also apologized to the baby's family and her two daughters.
