From a news story from Alberta.
Yeah, it’s all sounding pretty messed-up. My take - 12 year old girl starts dating 23 year old guy, family doesn’t approve (big friggin’ shock), 12 year old and 23 year old off them. She probably won’t be tried as an adult in Alberta, but I think if she had anything to do with the crimes, she should be. Her sentence for killing her family as a young offender will be a joke (a couple of years in a light detention centre and her records sealed when she turns 18).
They can’t report the name of the girl or her family, because she’s a so-called young offender, but they can show her exact house and interview close family friends.
In other words, it’s good to be a youth doing crimes in Canada.
So in fact nobody will “officially” know her name, but unoffically, everyone will know?
I can’t imagine that the neighbours, friends and family don’t know already. If we had any Dopers in Medicine Hat, I would guess they already know. If I drove to Medicine Hat this weekend, I could probably ask any waitress at a coffee shop who was killed and she’d know. So yeah, the media ban is pretty much just a formality.
Didn’t they publish her name early on when the parents and brother’s bodies had been discovered and she was just “missing”?
The media are having a field day - because the 23 year old had put a mildly disturbing poem on his blog on Nexopia. The media got a hold of it before his lawyer did, so now it’s all over the news.
Wait now - if I understand the YO Act corectly (and granted, I’ve been gone for many years), they can’t identify the dead because it may identify the minor girl. Have their names been in the press?
I hadn’t heard that, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
Sorry, that was for The Lady.
That’s exactly what is going on, Ginger - the dead family’s names have not been released because it would identify the young offender. I’m thinking this isn’t going to work very well.
Ginger is correct about the way publication restrictions work under the Youth Criminal Justice Act. I don’t recall any news items that identify the deceased. At first the news items said it was because of the usual “notify next of kin” rule, but as time went on and there were the mentions of the missing 12 year old from the family, I started to assume that the police thought she might be a suspect and were not releasing the names for that reason.
Okay, this is bullshit writing:
(from your first link, Piper). She stands accused of killing HER family. That’s a big goddamn difference.
I was sure the Calgary Sun ran her picture and her name on the front page…
But maybe I’m misremebering.
Okay, after reading the second story, I’m confused. Are the dead people the girl’s family, or not? I thought all the news reports were saying that it was her family, but these stories are very carefully not saying that she was related to the murdered people. If she is accused of murdering her own family, it needs to be reported as such - enough of the cutesie “a family.”
I’m not as familiar with the new Act as the old YOA, but a quick skim of the sentencing provisions suggests that a 12 year old cannot be tried as an adult. I think an accused has to be at least 14 before there’s any possibility of being tried as an adult.
The sentence for a young offender convicted of first degree murder is ten years, of which six shall be served in a youth detention centre and the remaining four years in close supervision. If at the end of the initial six years, the Crown believes that the young offender continues to pose a risk of violence to other, the Crown can apply to have the entire sentence served in the detention centre.
See the Youth Criminal Justice Act:
Yeah, Alberta’s certainly the place to murder your entire family and get away with it. As long as you’re under 14.
Lady, we had an old Sun in the break room at work, and yup, that was Jasmine Richardson’s picture on the cover. They were calling her 13 in that headline - I guess they have since found out she’s 12. And that is definitely her family she is accused of killing. I’m not sure why some media stories are saying “a family” rather than “her family” - it’s not like the media to undersensationalize something.
Thanks for the links and info on YO sentencing, Piper. I’ve been thinking more about this, and while I’m pretty sure a slap on the wrist for young offenders committing serious crimes isn’t good enough, I don’t know what would be better. I do know that if my 11 year old niece decided to kill my other niece, my sister, and my brother-in-law, putting her in custody for 10 years wouldn’t seem like much of a sentence to me.
I’m curious – how did they decide the girl killed her family and not the 23-year-old boyfriend? Plus, I won’t be surprised if we hear revelations that all was not peaches and cream with this girl’s homelife.
I’m pretty sure that’s right. Their names have been, but most of the online stories have been disappeared since then.
The Google News listings on the topic make no mention of names anymore, but if you know her name and Google for it, there are still a few out there.
It’s funny how self-obsessed the sites the two of them were supposed to have belonged to are - I took a look around them to see what they were saying about it, but other than a single “OMG, Look at this” copy-paste from a news article, there was nothing at all but badly spelt poems and blog entries.
You have been away for a while. 
Criminal law is federal in Canada, so it’s no easier or more difficult to “get away with it” in Alberta than anywhere else in the country.