Alberta court upholds manslaughter conviction of woman in sex slaying of girl, 13

EDMONTON - The mother of a 13-year-old girl killed in a brutal sex slaying says she is heartbroken after a Crown appeal of a manslaughter conviction for one of the teen's killers was rejected.
"It just means we're going through more torture," said Nina Courtepatte's mother, Peacha Atkinson.
"I'm not OK. Our hearts are broken even more and I don't know if they will ever heal."
Nina was raped twice and viciously beaten to death with a wrench and a sledgehammer after she was lured by a group of people from West Edmonton Mall to a golf course west of the city.
On Tuesday, the Alberta Court of Appeal upheld Stephanie Bird's 2007 manslaughter conviction in a 2-1 ruling.
However, the dissenting opinion by one of the three judges on the appeal panel - who ruled he would have substituted the manslaughter conviction with one of first-degree murder - gives the Crown an automatic right to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court of Canada.
The majority decision ruled Court of Queen's Bench Justice June Ross did not err when she found there was an air of reality to the defence argument of abandonment.
At trial, Ross ruled Bird was not guilty of first-degree murder because she had a "change of intent" when she communicated to the other accused she was leaving the scene to take a friend of Nina's to the car they used.
In his dissenting opinion, Justice Peter Costigan ruled Ross was mistaken about the abandonment defence and said the evidence at trial did not provide a sufficient foundation to show she had a change of intention.
Bird, 21, was sentenced to 12 years after being convicted of manslaughter, aggravated sexual assault and kidnapping for her role in the killing on April 3, 2005.
Ross found Bird knew of the plan to kidnap and kill a victim, had helped carry out the kidnapping, was armed, had hit Nina with a wrench and had held Nina's hands down while she was being raped.