Mom Convicted Of Killing Daughter With Disability Wins Retrial Due To Judge Error

A mother in Canada who was convicted for the murder of her 16-year-old daughter who had severe cerebral palsy was given another chance to prove her innocence Friday.

Cindy Ali won a new first-degree murder trial because of faulty instructions to the jury that convicted her four years ago, CTV News reported. Ontario’s highest court ordered a retrial after deciding that Ali deserved another chance to make her case due to the trial judge’s error.

The Appeal Court found that "the jury instructions wrongly narrowed the proper scope of the jury's deliberations."

"It is essential that all defenses and verdicts reasonably available on the evidence be left with the jury for its consideration," the ruling continued.

Ali, a mother of four, stood trial in 2016 for the murder of her severely disabled daughter Cynara, who was 16 when she died at their Toronto home in 2011.

At the time, the Crown alleged that Ali deliberately killed her teen daughter, who was prone to seizures, by suffocating her with a pillow and tried to cover it up with an elaborate home invasion tale. Prosecutors said that the crime scene appeared staged despite Ali's claims.

Despite this, Ali stood by her account of intruders — one armed with a gun — bursting into their home on Feb. 19, 2011, and tearing it apart in search of a mysterious “package,” Toronto Sun reported. She said that one of the men may have suffocated the girl or that her daughter may have had a stress-induced seizure and choked on food.

The trial judge at the time told the jury that they should assume she had participated in her daughter’s death and should be found guilty of murder if they believed Ali made up the robbery story.

“On the path cut by the trial judge’s instructions, the jury’s verdict of guilty of first-degree murder could have been based almost entirely on finding the appellant fabricated the home invasion story,” the Appeal Court said.

However, Justice David Doherty said he feels that the jury should have also considered an angle where Ali may have failed to respond properly to a seizure of Cynara. In this case, even if Ali had lied about a home invasion, this would have had a different significance to the case.

“It may have concluded the home invasion narrative was fabricated by the appellant to hide her failure to do what she knew she should have done to help her daughter,” Doherty wrote.

Superior Court Justice Todd Ducharme stated twice that he could see no other explanation than murder. For Doherty, however, he should have told jurors to consider all reasonable possibilities.

"The trial judge should also have instructed the jury to consider those other possible reasonable explanations in the context of the entirety of the evidence," the court said.