Advisory: This story involves details of a murder involving minors.
sa国际传媒 Court of Appeal judges have dismissed an appeal by convicted murderer Andrew Berry, who was challenging his sentence for killing his two young daughters on Christmas Day 2017 in Oak Bay.
Berry was sentenced in 2019 to life in prison with no eligibility for parole for 22 years for the second-degree murders of six-year-old Chloe and four-year-old Aubrey, who were found stabbed to death at his Beach Drive apartment.
His appeal was heard Friday by justices Elizabeth Bennett, David Harris and Karen Horsman. The judges reserved their reasons for dismissing the appeal for a later date.
Berry’s lawyer, Tim Russell, argued the trial judge erred in how much weight she gave to a sentencing recommendation by the jury and in characterizing Berry’s motivation.
The sentence is “excessive and unfit” and longer than sentences for similar offences, Russell said.
Crown prosecutor Megan Street said the judge acknowledged recommendations from two jurors for the minimum of 10 years and from six jurors who proposed 15 years for each murder to be served consecutively, but called them too low and too high and ultimately gave them no weight in determining Berry’s parole eligibility.
“There are few offenders with higher moral blameworthiness, and as I stated earlier at the beginning, few offences in more need of denunciation and deterrence,” she said.
In 2022, Berry lost an appeal to overturn his conviction after a four-day hearing before three members of the sa国际传媒 Court of Appeal.
After a five-month trial in 2019, a jury rejected Berry’s testimony that a “dark-skinned man” killed Chloe and Aubrey and attacked and injured him over a gambling debt to a loan shark. Berry was found naked, with life-threatening injuries in a bathtub.
Chloe was hit over the head with her pink baseball bat, then stabbed multiple times before and after death.
She was found in her bed in her pyjamas. Aubrey was also found in her bed, in her pyjamas, with multiple knife wounds to her torso. Then Berry tried to kill himself with a knife, inflicting much shallower wounds on his own body, the court heard at trial.
