A caregiver whose charge died of severe malnutrition in Port Coquitlam won't be going to jail.
On Tuesday (Aug. 22), the BC Court of Appeal overturned the 12-month conditional sentence given to Astrid Charlotte Dahl following the death of Florence Girard in 2018.
Last year, the 54-year-old Dahl was convicted for failing to provide the necessities of life to Girard, a woman with Down syndrome with whom she was living in PoCo.
Instead, the three appeal court judges sentenced Dahl to 15 months in jail.
However, she won't be heading behind bars as she's already served 10 months of her conditional sentence.
The judges said Dahl would have also have earned five months of credit for good behaviour, meaning her jail term would have been served as of July 29.
In their decision, Justices Mary Newbury, John Hunter and Patrice Abrioux wrote that the initial sentence imposed "departs unreasonably from the fundamental principle of proportionality by failing to give proper effect to the principles of deterrence and denunciation."
According to court records, the England-born Dahl worked on contract with Kinsight Community Society.
She noticed Girard was losing weight in 2018, but did not take her to see a doctor.
"As Ms. Girard's live-in care provider, the accused regularly saw and interacted with Ms. Girard," the sentencing judge wrote last year.
"At the very least, such a reasonable person would have observed Ms. Girard's deteriorating health and would have sought some form of medical assistance in the last few weeks of her life.
"Yet, the accused did little or nothing in that regard."
Dahl's son was living in the home at the time of Girard's death, noted the sentencing judge who later acquitted Dahl of criminal negligence causing death.
In the written appeal judgment, Abrioux wrote that Dahl's role, "as a paid caregiver to Ms. Girard, the special trust relationship that existed in the context of abject vulnerability, the significant breach of that trust and Ms. Dahl's failure to seek medical care for Ms. Girard when it was 'patently obvious' that not doing so would endanger her life, cannot be ignored."
"Tragically, the respondent's failure to perform her duty resulted in Ms. Girard's likely preventable death. Such a failure is deserving of heightened denunciation and deterrence," he wrote.
Besides the jail term, the appeal judges also ordered to Dahl to serve another 12 months of probation.
