Whether a woman who stole more than $350,000 from her employer was suffering from depression emerged as a key issue as Crown and defence lawyers argued their positions during a sentencing hearing on Monday.
Crown prosecutor John Neal is seeking a three-year prison sentence for Debra Velma Penttila, 63, while defence counsel Jason LeBlond is submitting a conditional sentence order lasting two years less a day followed by three years probation is appropriate.
Penttila has pleaded guilty to a count of fraud over $5,000. Between November 2004 and February 2011, she used her co-signing authority to alter 166 cheques adding up to $362,740 to make them payable to herself, the court has heard.
The money was spent on gambling. While the court cannot consider gambling as a mitigating factor, LeBlond argued Penttila could have been suffering from depression and encouraged provincial court judge Michael Gray to take the possibility into account.
However, Neal countered that nowhere in the two psychiatric assessments conducted on her was it said that Penttila was diagnosed with the the ailment and none has been made to this day.
"Neither of those doctors is prepared to say that mental illness led to the offending or that mental illness led to the gambling that led to the offending," Neal said.
"And yet, my learned friend is inviting the court to do exactly that - to make its own psychiatric diagnosis, to go further than the medical professionals were prepared to do in this case."
LeBlond painted a picture of a woman in a state of high stress at the time she committed the crime. Her husband was suffering from health issues and not working, her father had recently died and the effects of Alzheimers had put her mother into a home.
In response to an "accumulation of stress," and perhaps depression, Penttila turned to gambling as a form of relief. She ran up roughly $100,000 in debt through credit cards and a line of credit before she started to commit the fraud.
The court has heard that Penttila found ways to alter cheques sent out and received by her employer to make her the payee and employed various tactics to string out the fraud. By the time the fraud was discovered, the company's books were a "mess" and charges were not laid until February 2017 because it took so long to determine the extent of the scam.
In some ways, conditional sentence order followed by probation is more onerous, LeBlond suggested, because it would last for five years, compared to the three years in jail Crown counsel is seeking. Conditional sentences are served at home but with conditions such as a curfew.
If the judge decides in favour of jail time, LeBlond argued for two years plus a day so it could be served in a federal institution where programs for inmates tend to be better.
"I just want to say I am sincerely sorry for everything I have done and everbody that I have hurt," Penttila said when given a chance to speak.
Gray will issue his decision at a later date, likely near the end of this month.
