An Alberta woman who admitted to killing her husband and dumping his body in a slough is appealing her sentence.
Helen Naslund was sentenced in October 2020 to 18 years after pleading guilty to manslaughter in the September 2011 shooting of 49-year-old Miles Naslund on a farm near Holden, Alta.
A document filed Thursday with the Court of Appeal of Alberta states the sentence is being appealed on the ground that the 18-year sentence “brings the administration of justice into disrepute.”
The court also “erred in failing to give proper consideration to the appellant’s history of domestic abuse at the hand of the deceased and thus erred in calling this crime ‘callous, cowardly on a vulnerable victim in his own home,'” the court document states.
Neil Naslund, the couple’s son, pleaded guilty to offering an indignity to human remains and was sentenced to three years in prison in Edmonton’s Court of Queen’s Bench.
Helen Naslund and her son were both initially charged with first-degree murder and offering an indignity to human remains.
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An agreed statement of facts stated there was a domineering pattern of abuse in the couple’s marriage. Naslund shot her husband twice in the back of his head with a 22-calibre pistol when he was in bed.
The statement of facts says Naslund and her son put the man’s body in a metal truck box and used a boat to dump it in a swampy area.
The pair threw the gun in another slough and buried the victim’s car in a farmer’s field, according to the statement of facts.
His body was not found for six years.
The concept of Battered Woman Syndrome factored into sentencing but it requires proof of self-defence and the Crown didn’t think it met that threshold.
RCMP had never been called to the house for domestic violence before.
With files from The Canadian Press.
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