Incest conviction for Ontario coupleBy CP
Thu, August 18, 2005
KITCHENER, Ont. -- A southwestern Ontario mother and son have been found guilty of incest after posing as husband and wife and having three children together.
A jury delivered the verdict against the pair yesterday, in what a Crown prosecutor calls one of the strangest cases he has ever seen.
"It's as weird as I could ever imagine," Steve Paciocco said outside an Ontario Superior Court.
"In 20 years I've never seen anything close to it. It's book material," Paciocco said.
After just over a day of deliberation, jurors found the 25-year-old man and his 43-year-old mother guilty of having sex with each other between 1996 and 2001.
They also found the man guilty of four counts of fabricating and using fake documents in an attempt to create a new identity to cover up their incestuous relationship.
The man claimed throughout the trial that he was not his mother's son, but her husband.
The son had conveniently died in a volcano in the Congo several weeks after suspicious social workers asked the woman to present her son and her husband together in one room, court heard during the trial.
The mother was found guilty of 46 forgery-related charges.
Perhaps oddest of all, the mother's lawyer, in her final arguments, suggested that even if the couple was mother and son, their three children could have been born using the "turkey-baster" home method of artificial insemination.
Defence lawyer John Lang, who represented the son, acknowledged the uphill battle for the defence. Lang didn't call any witnesses.
Lang suggested his client was sexually victimized and groomed by his mother.
"In any right-thinking mind, he was a victim," Lang said.
His client was just 16 when he fathered the first of three children born to the couple, Lang pointed out.
The couple was led off to jail after the judge ruled they should be held in custody until their sentencing on Oct. 14.
Paciocco acknowledged a different level of guilt between the mother and son. He said he will ask for a substantial prison sentence for the mother, but a lower sentence, of around two years, for the son.
Author
