Eric Smith 
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Psychological well being professionals will typically inform courts that one of the best ways to gauge the chance an offender will commit future crimes is their previous behaviour.
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They’ll clarify a historical past of violence is a good predictor of comparable conduct sooner or later.
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It nearly appears at odds with the precept an individual’s felony previous can’t be used in opposition to them to show their guilt of a subsequent allegation.
However whereas courts can’t use an individual’s prior dangerous behaviour when figuring out guilt, or innocence, they’ll use it to find out an applicable size of sentence.
A profession felony is way extra prone to prey on the general public sooner or later and due to this fact can be locked up for an extended interval, typically even indefinitely in the event that they’re deemed an excellent danger to reoffend.
Convicted double assassin Robert Leeming had no such historical past of violating sections of the Felony Code.
However an act dedicated lower than a yr earlier than he murdered his typically girlfriend, Jasmine Lovett, and her toddler daughter, Aliyah Sanderson, foreshadowed Leeming’s penchant for violence.
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On the Might lengthy weekend of 2018, Leeming determined he’d have sufficient of the household canine he inherited in his cut up along with his spouse.
However as a substitute of turning the canine over to the Calgary Humane Society, the place it might be put up for adoption, Leeming took the animal to a distant location west of the town, tethered it to a tree 200 metres from the freeway and left it there with out meals or water.
Leeming’s clarification at his Aug. 15, 2018, sentencing listening to for 3 costs underneath the provincial Animal Safety Act confirmed the obvious identical indifference to life he displayed when he bludgeoned Lovett in his Calgary townhome on April 19, 2019, earlier than placing a bullet in her head.
He subsequently inflicted extreme head accidents to little Aliyah, earlier than loading each our bodies into his SUV and taking them to a distant wooded space in Kananaskis Nation and burying them in shallow graves.
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Crown prosecutor Doug Taylor, who’s searching for the utmost parole ineligibility for Leeming of 25 years, referred to a duplicate of the transcript of the killer’s Animal Safety Act listening to throughout his double second-degree homicide sentencing listening to final week.
In it, Leeming admitted leaving his canine out within the woods, tied to a tree the place it was inclined to assaults by greater prey.
“It’s a residing animal tethered to a tree, so it couldn’t even fend for itself as a home transformed to a wild animal,” magistrate Lori Plater famous.
“The way you thought tethering it to a tree was a humane choice to make for it …” Plater continued, earlier than Leeming interjected.
“He would have chewed, like, ought to have chewed by way of it. He chewed by way of every thing else. He ate half the home,” was Leeming’s clarification.
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“So why hassle tethering it to a tree?” Plater requested.
“Yeah,” was all of the response Leeming might muster.
“And that may be a actually ridiculous response, I’ve to say,” the justice of the peace added.
It was solely a stroke of luck the canine was even discovered. The proprietor of the property, an acreage off Hwy. 22, didn’t dwell there, however had gone to examine it that weekend when she came across the stranded pooch.
Contemplating what he did to Lovett and little Aliyah lower than a yr after leaving his pet to the weather, it’s a shock Leeming didn’t simply put a bullet into the canine’s head.
However that might have at the very least been the extra humane factor to do and maybe Leeming didn’t need to waste the ammunition.
Because it was, he principally sentenced the animal to a merciless demise, both by way of hunger, or underneath assault by a predator, with out even an opportunity to flee.
A date for Leeming’s sentencing choice can be set Friday.
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