Closing statements wrap up in Lam sisters' murder trial in Ottawa

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Closing arguments have wrapped up and the jury in the murder trial of two Vietnamese sisters in Ottawa was to be sequestered starting Tuesday after receiving instructions from the judge in the case.

Hue Ai Lam and her sister Chau Khan Lam face first-degree murder charges in relation to the death of their mother, Kieu Lam, in October 2022.

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Both sisters pleaded not guilty, saying they killed their mother after suffering from years of verbal and physical abuse.

Ewan Lyttle, Chau’s lawyer, and Paolo Giancaterino, Hue’s lawyer, argued Monday that the sisters were acting in self-defence.

Kieu never showed her daughters love and affection, they said. Instead, they said, she physically and verbally assaulted them for decades, causing deep psychological harm.

Giancaterino also said the abuse escalated after Hue was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, which left her with decreased ability to defend herself.

“This is a case about a woman who, throughout her adult years, was controlled, demeaned and subjected to violence at the hands of her mother, who once she was no longer of use to her mother faced an escalation of the emotional and physical violence to the point that she attempted to commit suicide,” Giancaterino said.

Lyttle also said Chau was isolated from the world, forbidden from having any semblance of a social life in Ottawa.

Despite living in the city for 30 years, Lyttle said Chau did not have any friends and rarely visited her brothers. Chau had to ask her mother for permission if she wanted to go out of the house, or else the elderly woman would accuse her of being disobedient.

He pointed to statements where Chau said she stayed home to take care of her mother, but was physically abused. Kieu once jabbed Chau in the forehead while getting her toenails clipped, she said while on the witness stand earlier in July.

“You must understand that child was in her mother’s presence, literally, 24 hours a day for decades. She was impossible to avoid,” Lyttle told the jury.

Lyttle and Giancaterino told the jury the sisters ultimately felt like they did not have a lot of options to leave the abuse because of cultural expectations.

Both of them were expected to take care of their elderly mother to show filial piety, a core value in Vietnamese culture.

Daniele Belanger, a Vietnamese cultural expert who testified on July 7, said family was the foundation of Vietnamese culture and society. Children are often taught that they owe their lives to their parents and are often expected to care for their aging parents at home.

Vietnamese children are also expected to respect and obey their parents no matter what, Belanger added.

However, Lyttle and Giancaterino said the sisters did try to escape the abuse despite the cultural pressures.

Chau and her brother, Chanh Huynh, previously told the jury that they tried to take their mother to a nursing home, but Kieu returned to the Lam residence three days later. The abuse escalated after that, both lawyers said.

The sisters also went to Vietnam sometime before the COVID-19 pandemic to avoid their mother, Huynh previously testified.

Sisters not acting in self-defence, Crown says

Julian Whitten, a lawyer for the Crown, asked the jury to convict the sisters of first-degree murder because killing was an unreasonable and disproportionate response to the abuse they suffered from.

Lots of Canadians suffer from traumatic and hard situations with their families, but self-defence cannot legitimize the killing of those difficult parents, he said.

But Whitten said there was little evidence confirming that Hue was subjected to assault and the severity of those assaults.

He told the jury that Chau testified by saying she never observed Kieu breaking any of Hue’s bones, nor did she observe Kieu giving Hue a black eye.

“The nature of the physical violence, although not ideal, was neither heinous nor life-threatening,” Whitten said in his submissions.

“You may accept that some rudimentary weapons were used, namely the broom handle or the snow removal stick, or you may not, but you can be certain that she was not assaulted with any knives. There were no guns. She wasn’t even assaulted with a hammer.”

Whitten also argued that Hue and Chau both had the cognitive ability to plan the killing and understood the consequences of their actions.

Both sisters planned to kill her for a week before the incident, including different ways they could kill her, he said. They also planned to use weapons in advance.

During the first week of the trial, the Crown showed videos of Hue and Chau allegedly confessing to police that they had killed their mother.

The Crown also played an audio recording of the 911 call Chau made that night, in which she said she killed her mother.

“They understood they were killing their own mother. They understood that killing her was against the law. There was murder. When you boil down all of the evidence you have heard halfway, a child killed their mother because they were sick of her behaviour,” Whitten said.

“Ultimately, they resented her. They were angry at her for levelling verbal abuse. Life was changing as a result of (Hue’s) diagnosis, and their mother did not make that any easier.”

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