Sentencing for Deadly Drunk Driving

"As an engineer, he understood physics. As an elite rugby player, he knew what happens when force meets force. So he did what he could."
"He hit the brakes and veered away."
"Bryan Casey helped save your life. You're welcome."
"You killed a human being."
LeeEllen Carroll, mother of three, wife of DUI victim

Bryan Casey's widow, LeeEllen Carroll, speaks to reporters outside the Elgin Street courthouse in Ottawa on May 29, 2015, after Christy Natsis is found guilty of impaired driving causing her husband's death. (CBC News)

"I am so deeply sorry."
"I know my anguish and remorse pales in comparison to what the
Casey family has to endure. [I plan to live] with more care, compassion, prudence and good judgement."
Christy Natsis, drunk driver

Repentance? Anguish? Only as it pertains to the four-year-ordeal that she has suffered with the protracted trial proceedings that her high-paid lawyers were able to effect on her behalf in their prodigious legal wranglings to have the case against this Pembroke dental professional dismissed on the basis that her legal 'rights' had been improperly breached. They were sufficiently successful in their efforts that critical evidence was thrown out.

Repentance? Anguish? The swaggering ego and self-involvement that witnesses reported did not portray someone who would repent too readily. Her arrogant demands, and her disinterest in the condition of Bryan Casey, the man who was dying in the same hospital that she demanded she be treated for a spurious injury, was hard to ignore. Her manner imperious and impervious to self-castigation over the plight of a family of three young children left without a father demonstrated an attitude of runaway entitlement.

She had pleaded not guilty to the charges laid against her. And this set the course for a painful, prolonged trial during which Bryan Casey's wife, his extended family and friends, above all his children, suffered the anguish that Ms. Natsis claimed for herself. In her victim impact statement Bryan Casey's wife informed the court of the ongoing grief and pain suffered by three young children in the absence of their father.

Ms. Natsis had, after long delays and legal obfuscation and denials, been found guilty of causing death through impaired driving. She was evidently so heart-broken at the death she caused that after that signal event in her life that would transform her into a more cautious, caring person, she was arrested months later after entering a Rideau Street Liquor Control Board of Ontario outlet to buy two 12-ounce bottles of vodka, despite bail conditions that she abstain from alcohol.

At this juncture Justice Neil Kozloff must decide the sentencing penalty to be imposed on this incorrigible woman. Whom her lawyers portray as a pillar of her society, concerned with philanthropy; far less so obviously with her obligations to protect others as well as herself while using a lethal weapon in public. The Crown seeks a term of six to eight years in penitentiary.

While Ms. Natsis' lawyers feel a prison term of between 3-1/3 to four years would more accurately reflect the punishment she has earned.

Four years for the wilful destruction of a man's life. She had left a pub after imbibing on that fateful night, so inebriated that when she pulled out of the parking lot witnesses saw her hit another car before screeching off into the night. On the highway she was observed swerving recklessly and driving much too fast before she veered into the oncoming lane and the vehicle driven by the man she killed.