GUILTY Canada - Katrina Effert, 19, charged in death of newborn, Alberta, 14 April 2005

More than six years and two jury trials after 19-year-old Katrina Effert gave birth to a boy in her parents’ basement after a secret pregnancy, strangled him with thong underwear and tossed his body, wrapped in a towel, into a neighbour’s yard in Wetaskiwin, Alta., the Court of Appeal of Alberta last week sentenced her to time served for improper disposal of a body.

With a suspended sentence for the infanticide, she is now “a quiet young woman going about her life,” and working in her mother’s hair salon, her lawyer Peter Royal said yesterday.

The ruling on the disposal charge, which spared her the remaining two weeks of a three-month sentence, follows an outcry over a judge’s comparison of infanticide to abortion, which was was held up as evidence that Canadian courts do not give full value to newborn human life.

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