It’s not the amount of time that stuns Amanda Todd’s mother, but the comments made by the Dutch lawyer for her daughter’s convicted extortionist.
At a Thursday hearing in Amsterdam, Robert Malewicz criticized Canadian authorities for releasing Aydin Coban’s personal details, including a picture of him. He noted that his client would now be forever linked to Amanda, who died by suicide in 2012 after years of sexual blackmail and harassment.
“He will always be recognized,” Malewicz said. “That feels, for him, like a life sentence.”
In October, Coban was sentenced in Canada to 13 years behind bars for harassment, extortion, child luring, and possession and distribution of child pornography in connection with the “sextortion” of the Port Coquitlam teen. Amanda was 15 years old when she took her life after detailing her torment in a YouTube video that went viral around the world.
Her mother Carol Todd said she was stunned to hear Coban’s lawyer suggest it’s not fair he be “recognized” for that. She, and a coalition of media outlets, fought and won to have publication ban lifted in the case.
“I just shook my head, I had to read that one a few times,” Todd told Global News on Thursday.
“I’m sorry, but you did it, so you have to pay the price — and it’s going to be a lifetime because Amanda’s death is a lifetime.”
Coban did not appear in Amsterdam District Court on Thursday, where prosecutors sought to cut his Canadian sentence time from 13 years to four-and-a-half. The hearing was meant to convert the Canadian sentence into a period of time that conforms with Dutch law.
Coban’s sentence is to be served in the Netherlands after he finishes a nearly 11-year sentence in August 2024 for other, similar, crimes. He had already been convicted of targeting more than 30 other victims when he was extradited to Canada to face trial in Amanda’s case.
Todd said four-and-a-half years — if granted by the judge on July 13 — is “better than zero.”
“For the last eight months, I’ve been thinking that it’d be zero,” she explained. “I would have loved the ultimate of 13, but any time extra that Aydin Coban can spend behind bars, away from the public, away from the internet — technology — is a good thing.”
Arguing for a reduction, Coban’s lawyer, Malewicz, called the Canadian sentence “exorbitantly high, even by Canadian standards.” He said Coban shouldn’t get any extra prison time in the Netherlands, but that if he does it should be no more than one year with six months suspended.
That would mean Coban would only have to serve an extra six months if he commits another offence.
Canadian Crown prosecutors sought a 12-year sentence in Todd’s case, but B.C. Supreme Court Justice Martha Devlin handed him a precedent-setting 13 years in October, stating that “ruining Amanda’s life was Mr. Coban’s expressly stated goal, and was sadly one that he achieved.”
Public prosecutor Kasper van der Schaft told judges in the Netherlannds on Thursday that a Dutch court would normally hand a four-year sentence to Coban for the crimes he was convicted of in Canada. He urged judges to impose an extra six months, however, acknowledging Canadians who know Amanda’s case would be “shocked” to see a such a large reduction in prison time.
Todd submitted a victim impact statement for the hearing, but Coban’s lawyers opted not to have it read aloud in court.
“People ask me what, like if anything, gets me riled up and it’s all the rights that this offender has,” Todd said.
“He is trying to, and he does call the shots, and that upsets me, right? Because my daughter is no longer here. She doesn’t have a voice, but yet he has a voice.”
— with files from The Canadian Press and Global News’ Aaron McArthur
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